goose an annual review of short fiction
Volume 8 Spring 2019 Produced at Victoria College in the University of Toronto
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masthead Co-Presidents & Editors-in-Chief Nikta Sadati Isobel R.S Carnegie
Editorial Board Amanda Gosio Hadiyyah Kuma Amanda Voore-Lewis Chris Loose Charlotte Chellew Emily Hurmizi
Artists
Sayaka Daly (Head Illustrator) Liam P. Bryant Lauren Laisying
Layout Editor Ashley An
Cover Art by Liam P. Bryant
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table of contents Letter from the Editors
04
Wood
07
Nothin’ Good
10
Room 105
20
Gardening
28
Surfacing
36
Modern Blob
41
North of May
63
The Idem
65
Grace Ma
Joseph Strauss
Victoria McIntyre
Connor Bennett
Kazi Moquit
Beck Siegel
Sanna Wani
Lucas Ratigan
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letter from the editors
These pages hold a dedication to the written word – by stu-
dents, Torontonians – and the hard work of many. It has been an honour to bring this journal to life this spring, with the help of our devoted and stupendous team and the writers who had the courage to entrust us with pieces of themselves. We recognize the depth of responsibility that we are entrusted with when given these words.
Tasked with editing, our board strived to polish each work in
order to shed light on the creative voice of our authors. Our illustrators took the written word and found their own inspiration, further animating the testimonies in these pages. To our team, we thank you for your endless creativity and zeal. The care you gave to Goose and the stories here shows.
As co-editors-in-chief, we strive towards having the Goose rep-
resent a collaboration of creative minds, fostering connections between creatives and presenting a journal that we could all be proud of. We believe we have achieved this, and are beyond proud to introduce the 2018-19 journal to you. We hope in reading the following narratives, you can experience what we have in putting this edition together – a harmony of thoughtful and eloquent practice of language and the written word that evokes the sentiment of being human. Nikta Sadati & Isobel R.S Carnegie Co-Editors in Chief 2018-19
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Lauren Laisying
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wood Tap.
Tap tap.
Mauve slides the wood board over a little and peaks out.
“It’s me. Let me in.”
Her eyes draw back and she brings her knees to her arms. The
wood beneath her creaks, swings. Nighttime, but the cicadas are silent. Only the brush of wind against tall, short, docile grass.
“Mauve,” he is close to a whisper.
She uncurls and pushes the door open. Lee comes in, crouch-
ing on all fours. A cat glides through his arms and legs, one by one. Its paws make only a damp sound on the wood, as if they have chosen the mutest spots of the floor.
“When did you get a cat?”
“When did you decide that you would show up here at such a
time?”
“You want to see me.”
Mauve becomes silent again. She lies down and looks through
the opening of the roof. The darkest stains of the night are dripping off the branches and into her eyes and cheeks. She senses Lee’s hand pressing against her shoulder.
It should be warm, but it is not quite anything.
The cat has come back, this time with a rat in its mouth. A
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limp little creature that seems to have been born dead is dropped onto Mauve’s chest. “Mauve...”
“Lee, why didn’t you come sooner.”
Lee’s hand shifts a little. Then, it tentatively grabs the tiny
body from Mauve’s chest. There is a faint thud as the rat strikes the ground; it rolls and settles on top of dirt, roots, fossils.
“I’m here now. That’s what matters.”
Mauve sighs. He is here now. Lee.
“Tell me, Lee: what if this is just my dream?”
Lee’s body pauses and Mauve holds her breath.
“...Well, I certainly feel quite normal,” he chuckles quietly.
Mauve shakes her head, a smile forming on her lips. She grabs
Lee’s arm and it jolts right towards her.
“Come, I think it’s too nice to be in here.”
They breathe in, bend the wooden planks with their knees, and
bounce down into the grass, surely and suddenly. The soft little wisps are like a bed, but Mauve doesn’t want to sleep. The distant stars blink all at once.
“What shall we do come morning, Lee?”
“Seems to me it’ll never arrive.”
They tread in the grass, which grows taller and more abun-
dant. A dark-skinned lizard perches on Lee’s shoulder, flicking its tongue in and out, in and out. Its eyes, two black spheres in moonlight, dart in every purposeless direction. Mauve pants a little and the lizard
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gives her a disapproving glance. Crunch.
“Oh,” Mauve reacts automatically.
She draws her foot away from the ground and discovers broken
shells.
“Baby turtles,” Lee declares. “The mother is long gone.”
Mauve brings her eyes closer to the scene. No seeping blood or
crushed flesh. Just sharp little bits of yellowed white.
“Should we move on or should we stay, Lee?”
“And I’m asking you,” he replies bluntly.
The lizard climbs down Lee’s back and scurries off. Mauve
watches it disappear.
“... I wish I knew you better. Do you wish the same?” Mauve
looks into Lee’s eyes.
Lee steps closer to her, rests his arms by his side. The moon
beams right above his blank gaze.
Mauve notices but forgets.
Lightness pokes shyly into their bodies.
Mauve listens, and the silence is all unknowing.
Mauve’s pulse arises from her skin. She thinks it stays in flesh
and she thinks it evaporates to sky.
She’s asking herself for an answer, perhaps.
Grace Ma
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nothin’ good
Griff ’s looking at me like I owe him something, arms crossed
and foot tapping on the soft leaves. He’s a couple years older than me, and the hair on his jaw’s looking less like peach fuzz and more like a real man’s. Not mine, though––I still got that damned fuzz hugging my upper lip, the kinda thing that makes a boy look stupid. Griff starts stroking at that red hair he’s got on his chin like he’s trying to make an ass outta me and my stupid little lip-hat.
“What are you waiting for, Billy? Wanna formal goddamn
invitation?”
We used to be the same height, me and Griff, but now I gotta
look up at him whenever we speak. And his voice is getting deep like a real man’s too, like Dad’s was. Makes me sound like a damned woman.
I make my voice sound lower than it really is. “Not sure if I
wanna go,” I say. I already know that I don’t.
Griff smiles a wicked little smirk. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re
afraid, Billy,” he says through his teeth. “Buncha trees gonna hurt you?”
Just might, I wanna tell him, but then he’ll think I’m some
kinda sissy.
We’re standing on the border right now, where the edge of Old
Earl’s farmland meets the big woods. It’s nothing but tall grass and cow dung on one side, and nothing but towering red pines and birch
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trees on the other. It’s still kinda sunny on Old Earl’s farm, but it’s dark in those woods. Real dark.
Griff cocks his head and looks at me like I’m pathetic. “Don’t
be a goddamn sissy, now.”
“I’m no sissy,” I tell him, and I feel my face getting all red.
“Watch who you’re calling a sissy, Griff. Last thing I am’s a damned sissy.”
“Then let’s go,” he says, and he’s already going. I got no choice
but to follow.
I live about two hours away from one of them big towns with
a couple hundred people. But out here, shoot, we’re in the goddamned center of the middle of nowhere.
Quite a while we’ve been walking now, and Griff ’s telling tales
about his girls and how he shot a great big stag between its dumb brown eyes right here in this brush. The trees are swallowing us whole, and I realize I wouldn’t know which way is home if I decide to turn back.
Tall and skinny trees shoot up everywhere like arms of a man
being buried alive. There’s a cool wind making them sway, and some of the leaves on the ground––the lucky ones, I’d say––float in the air for a short while during the gusts. The whole ground is covered in leaves like it’s one great big carpet of fire and rust. Soon enough the red and gold ones are gonna rot just like all the others, though. They always do. “...Amy’s her name,” Griff says as he ducks under a low branch. He’s talking over the crunching of our footsteps. “Pretty like a pup and
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sweet as honey.” I bet Amy’s one of them older girls who’d look at my little lip hairs and hear my girly voice and laugh. “...So one day we’re getting a little more comfortable, you see, and we’re out in the middle of the field, so not a damned soul could hear us…”
I’m nodding and saying, “right,” so he thinks I’m listening,
but really my mind’s on its own trip. The deeper we plummet into the woods, the darker it gets, and not because it’s getting later.
Then the wind breathes through the trees, and I swear I can
hear Dad’s voice blowing those dead leaves around. He’s saying something he used to say to me: “Now, Billy, don’t be goin’ into them woods
behind Old Earl’s farmland. You hear me? Nothin’ good in them woods, Billy.” He told me that when I was nine, then again and again and again till I memorized it, and then again and again and again till he left for a hunt in these very woods and never came back.
“Hell, Griff, we gotta head back,” I say all of a sudden. “We’re
never gonna find the damn thing.”
He frowns then crosses his arms. “What’s the big hurry?”
“Momma didn’t say I could leave home for a damn week,” I
say, trying to sound tough. “I haven’t seen any sonofabitchin’ cabin, and you got no idea where to look. So let’s just go.”
He thinks on what I say but he’s too damn stubborn. “You’re
welcome to leave, but I’m not going till I find it.”
He’s sure got me there—only destination I could guide myself
to is a tree, and there’s about a million of those every which way.
I’m looking up at the trees, trying not to trip on any roots. A
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few leaves are still falling. The branches look like an old lady’s gnarled fingers, reaching out to each other for comfort in the winter. I stumble, but Griff ’s too lost in his own story to even notice.
“D’you remember where you saw it the first time?” I ask.
Might as well try to help if I can’t talk him out of it.
“Buncha deer shit everywhere, I remember, and then sweet
Sally Lou prances over and stares right down my double-barrel,” he says, and starts to chuckle. “So I shoot her and walk over to the dead dumb thing, thinking about the juicy Sally Lou venison I’m gonna have that night––then outta the corner o’ my eye, there’s this tiny little wood cabin, real tall and skinny, stickin’ out like a sore thumb in these here woods. Looked older than Earl himself.”
I sigh like Momma does when she can’t make any sense outta
what I’m doing. “Why do we have to find the damn cabin, Griff? It’s just an ol’ hunk o’ wood.”
Griff runs his hands along the rough trunks as he leads me
deeper into these woods than I’ve ever gone, deeper than I even knew existed.
“Cause I wanna go inside,” Griff says to me. “Went back home
afterward and told about the cabin to everyone, and not a goddamned soul believed me. Maybe we could bring back something from inside.”
“Didn’t you go inside the first time?”
“No,” Griff spits like he hates the taste of the word.
“Well why not?” I ask him. “Was there a door?”
He stops suddenly and looks at me like he’s real cross. “I didn’t
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go inside,” he says hastily, then keeps on walking, this time real quick. Maybe he was too spooked to go in alone, but I’d never dare accuse him of something like that. He’d probably knock my teeth out and leave me with them in the leaves.
The crisp autumn wind starts howling again, and Dad’s voice is
back too. “Now, Billy, don’t be goin’ into them woods behind Old Earl’s
farmland,” he’s saying for the umpteenth time. “You hear me? Nothin’ good in them woods, Billy.” I wanna say something back to him. I wanna say, “I know, Dad, but I don’t have no choice! Griff ’s gonna think
I’m some kinda sissy, and I don’t know which way’s home anymore.”
Dad’s voice calms me. I can picture him in front of me in his
red plaid shirt and dirty blue jeans, and he’s got that shotgun and revolver he always takes with him on a hunt. The gusts usually die down after a few moments, but this time it starts picking up, and Dad’s raising his voice. I look uneasily at Griff, but he just keeps going forward like he don’t even notice.
“Pretty windy,” I say, trying to make my voice deeper.
“I guess.”
Just when it feels like the wind is about to give in, it picks up
again and makes that last gust feel like nothing. The giant trees are leaning like drunkards trying to balance on one foot, and the dying leaves are getting tossed around like a bunch of tiny tornadoes. Dad’s starting to scream now, louder than I ever heard him scream when he was still around. He’s not saying words anymore, just screaming like he’s trying to scare me enough to turn back.
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The sky’s still blue, but only in the kinda way that a lake is
blue. The way that if you look closely at it, it’s really just a bleak, cold grey.
“What in the goddamned hell is going on?” I say, trying to
keep my voice steady. Griff don’t even turn around––maybe he can’t hear me over Dad’s screaming.
There’s leaves smacking me in the face now, getting in my eyes.
I’m fighting my way through, swatting at the leaves like a madman in a swarm of mosquitoes in July.
That wind’s picking up even more, and Dad’s screaming as
loud as loud can be right into my ears. The wind’s so strong my feet ain’t even on the ground, and I’m just twisting in the air like one of them millions of dead leaves, trying to keep pace with Griff.
And then quick like a clap of thunder, the wind dies down
to a calm breeze and the trees sober up, and the leaves hit the ground again and so do I, and Dad’s voice is back to a whisper, saying the same thing he was saying before: “Now, Billy, don’t be goin’ into them woods
behind Old Earl’s farmland. You hear me? Nothin’ good in them woods, Billy.”
I gasp a little. “Son of a bitch, there it is!” I yell, pointing a
skinny finger to a dark shape in the distance.
Griff looks at the cabin, then looks back at me and bursts into
laughter. He’s nearly skipping when he says, “Everybody said I’m a liar or a dumbass or just plain nuts, but here it is, by God!”
I didn’t even wanna find the damned thing but now I’m nearly
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skipping like a jolly schoolgirl, giggling with Griff at our found treasure.
We’re closing in on that dark shape beyond some of them trees
and it’s looking bigger and bigger till finally it’s right there in front of us.
“How come no one ever heard tell of this?” I ask.
He shakes his head and rubs his red beard. “Nobody comes
out this far to find it, I guess. Needs some fixin’ up, alright. Hey, right there’s where I shot Sally Lou,” he says, pointing near the base of a big tall pine.
The ground is glinting with shades of red and gold, but them
trees are staring down at me like I done something wrong. And there’s something about that cabin, and I can tell now that Griff ’s feeling what I’m feeling.
It’s an odd looking thing. The cabin’s about twenty feet tall
and six feet wide, and it’s got the steepest roof I ever seen, starting all the way from the leaf-covered ground to a big point at the top. Not a hell of a lot of room in there. And there’s no windows––just walls of wood and nail that look ready to crumble if they don’t get no help. Thing’s got webs all over it, and a bunch of moss, and there’s a wooden plaque on the door with some writing. The plaque looks new, a few shades of green-brown lighter than the rest of the cabin.
“What’s that say?” I ask Griff, pointing at the plaque.
Griff looks at me like he don’t wanna say it, but he goes up to
the thing and does anyway. “This is my home now,” he reads slowly, “so
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please don’t trespass.” He pauses for a second and I think he’s finished, but there’s more. “You shouldn’t be this far into the woods. There’s nothing good in these woods.”
I must be making some kinda face, ‘cause Griff looks back at
me and gets all worried. “You alright?” he asks me for the first time.
“Sure I am,” I stammer, trying to even my voice.
“You look kinda pale, Billy. You sure you’re doin’ okay?”
I try to make a joke to calm myself down. “Nothing good in
these woods?” I say. “How’d they explain prancing Sally Lou, then?”
Griff chuckles but I’m not feeling any better. The more I look
at this cabin, the more it looks like a goddamned mausoleum in the middle of a forest.
“Let’s go in,” he says.
I wanna tell him no, but then he’ll know I’m a sissy, the way
he was the day he shot that deer. But he was alone that day, and I ain’t got that kinda excuse.
“Alright,” I say, and with every tiny step I take, the wind picks
up stronger and Dad’s voice gets louder. My heart’s pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. The leaves are swirling around again and hitting my face, and the wind’s carrying me with them, floating me toward the ancient-looking door. I think maybe Griff ’s saying something to me as I step in the cabin, but I can’t hear him over Dad.
It’s dusty in here, and there’s not a lotta light, but there’s not
much to see anyway. In fact, there’s nothing but four walls and a few rats getting some exercise.
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Then I see something. Spread across the small floor is a red
plaid shirt and a dirty pair of blue jeans, laid out like someone was wearing them. There’s something in them, too. I recognize the clothes, but the shape inside them is unfamiliar. It’s a bunch of bones, put together like a jigsaw puzzle. And on the side of the skull there’s a big old hole, and a dark stain on the floor beneath it. There’s a shotgun next to the sprawled arms of the skeleton, and next to those five skinny bones that were once the fingers of a man’s right hand, is a familiar looking revolver.
I’m not a damned sissy, I wanna scream, but there’s hot tears
welling up in my eyes, and I’m afraid I’ll set them loose if I start talking.
“Jesus Christ!” I hear Griff say when he sees the bones.
“Let’s leave,” I say with a graveness I’ve never had before. “We
should’na come here, Griff. There’s nothin’ good in these woods.”
Griff looks plain old stunned. “I… I don’t know the way
home,” he says with the voice of a boy, and in this light, his red beard just looks like fuzz.
I look outside and can’t find the sun between the trees. It’s get-
ting real dark in the woods, and home’s a long ways away. I hope Dad won’t mind if we spend the night with him.
I wanna hear him again. I wanna hear him tell me the same
damn thing he always told me about these here woods, but I can’t remember his voice.
Joseph Strauss
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Liam P. Bryant
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room 105
Richard poured himself another drink and sat down on the
edge of the hotel bed. The mattress gave slightly underneath his weight, the lumps curving inward. He tilted the half empty glass of scotch clutched in his gnarled fingers, watching the amber liquid shift from left to right. Stacy would be out of the washroom in a minute, he told himself. Her hair had gotten tangled in the fight. She was probably just brushing it out, fixing and grooming herself as incessantly as ever. He could picture the frantic parlour of her narrow face as she ran the brush through her thinning hair. She often shoved the bristles in until they sunk through the blonde strands and into the side of her neck, beating the dulled points against her skin over and over until the red marks seemed indelible. Richard’s lips curled.
He stared at the back of his fist with a tired eye. It was be-
ginning to darken to a familiar deep shade of purple, verging on black. Richard braced his arms on his naked legs and stared at the stained carpet. It’s fine, he told himself, we’re just adding new stains to old. This carpet can’t resemble the original colour at this point. Richard grumbled and looked around for something to do to pass the time. He thought he could he hear the grating noise of Stacy brushing her teeth for the fifth time in a row. He leaned over lazily and pulled the top drawer of the bedside table open with a yank from his index finger. It was empty, except for a battered copy of The Bible. There was a ciga-
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rette burn in the top right corner and a jagged piece of paper jutting out from the side where someone had hastily marked a page. Richard pulled it out.
He didn’t know much about religion. His father never bothered
with the whole indoctrination process: Sunday school, weekly mass, Christian parables. It all stopped after his mother left; she tended to initiate it. He flipped through the first few pages with quick flicks before deciding to turn to the page with the piece of paper sticking out.
The Song of Solomon: Chapter 7. The language skidded over Richard’s mind, not because he was dim, but because he hadn’t cared about words in a long time. He read 7:7 twice. “This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to cluster of grapes.” Stacy used to be pretty. She lost it somewhere along the way. Maybe it was while they were living above that Chinese restaurant in Vegas. No, it had to be after, she still wore that purple dress back then. It had to be about six months into when he started up with Darla. That felt right. Stacy’s eyes started getting wider, the skin around her mouth creasing. She grew wan.
Richard heard the faucet for the bath thundering from inside
the washroom and wondered how long it had been raining down. And what the hell was she doing, taking a bath and leaving him out here so bored that he was reading the damn Bible? Richard cursed under his stale breath. He slammed the Bible shut and stalked over to the off-white door with heavy footsteps, his bare feet thudding against the ground. He turned the handle and it stopped, locked. “Stacey, get the hell out of there, it’s been over an hour and I gotta piss.” No response
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floated out from the sliver of yellow light leaking out from under the door. Richard felt his insides broil at being ignored by this woman again. After earlier she should know better. He pushed himself against the door. It was already loose on its hinges. It swung open after a few shoves. “Stacy, I swear to God.” Each word came out quieter than the last until his voice was a breeze in his throat. Stacy’s naked body lay curled up at the bottom of an overflowing bathtub. He moved forward and pulled her out, but it was clear from the empty bottle of pills on the counter that it didn’t matter how fast he moved. There’s a verse in
The Song of Solomon that Richard would read repeatedly as he waited for the ambulance to arrive. “And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.” ***
Ralph had been in charge of booking the accommodations for
our tour and all of us regretted giving him any sort of responsibility. Each place we landed was worse than the last. Meryl had a suspicion that he looked up the cheapest hotel in every city and booked it right away. Judging the colour of the carpet in this room, I thought she may have been on to something. I ran my hands through my hair and knotted it in a low ponytail at the base of my neck. I was incredibly grimy; my stubble two days old, and my skin developing a permanent sheen. But I was also already late. Nobody told you how fast everything moved when you were on the road.
We’ve got to get to sound check at the venue at least an hour
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early. We also always end up leaving the previous city behind schedule because Sam wakes up when the bus is loaded to leave and stumbles into the bathroom, where she remains for half an hour. We’re all annoyed each time, but Meryl is the only one who has ever said anything to her. They often quipped back and forth like siblings––but damn if they didn’t know how to blend with each other’s sound better than anyone else I’d played with. Meryl’s voice was somewhere between Ella Fitzgerald and Norah Jones. Sam cradled the guitar against her body with an intimacy that made me blush when I watched her fingers move across the frets. I felt lucky when they asked me to fill in for Tom, but I didn’t know how grateful I would be by the last leg of the tour. They may not have been big shows, but they were always warm, knitted together by people who cared about finding jazz again and believing in something bright. I’d finished tying my shoes and stood to traverse the dingy room when Meryl opened the adjoining door.
“You’re late, honey.”
“Sorry, Mer.”
She fluffed up her hair with one hand and waved my guilt away
with the other. “Well, you would be, if the venue hadn’t cancelled on us. I just came through to tell you that we have the night off. Feel free to finally get some sleep, hun.”
A mixture of disappointment and relief mingled in my gut.
We’d been going every night for weeks and I knew I could use the rest, but I already missed the feeling of the black and white keys under my fingers. Meryl disappeared back into her room, humming softly to her-
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self as she went. I pulled off my shoes and flopped down on the crappy mattress. I just hoped it didn’t have bed bugs like the last place. Those tiny devils made me itchier than I could’ve imagined.
I looked around the room for something to do while waiting for
my phone to charge. Pulling a cigarette out of my jacket, I sat up and lit it with cupped hands. I’d feel bad about smoking inside if this room didn’t already smell so much like cigarettes. I couldn’t resist having one. In search of an ashtray, I reached over and pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table. All that was there was a copy of the Bible. I found myself aimlessly flipping through it, trying to remember anything I learned during my time in Catholic school. It was unfortunate that I couldn’t recall what they’d taught me, it would’ve been useful to have some knowledge of such a famous work of literature.
A soft knock sounded at the door. I took a drag from my cig-
arette and meandered over to answer it. Sam stood with her long hair tucked behind her ears in the hallway. “I’m bored. Can I come in?” I nodded and stepped aside. Her shoulder brushed my chest as she passed through the door. My spine tingled.
“Too bad about the venue.”
“Yeah, I had this new chord progression I was going to try out
tonight during the improvised bit at the end.”
“Ah, you’ll have to save it for tomorrow night.”
She walked over to the bed and picked up the book. “What are
you reading?” Sam spun it over and read the front cover. She turned to me with a bemused expression. “The Bible? Trying to find some guid-
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ance after all the sinning you’ve been doing on the road?”
I smiled. “I haven’t been doing nearly as much as I’d like.”
She ignored my comment. “There’s a verse from a poem that
my mom got tattooed on her ribcage. I don’t know where it is in here.”
“Do you know the quote?”
She glanced at me then looked away. “Above all else, guard
your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
“Sounds kind of rigid.”
“Well, she’s kind of rigid. But is it wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
Sam shrugged her shoulders. “Is it wrong to be careful of
things that can hurt you?”
I walked by her to drop the bud of my cigarette in the toilet.
She sat down on the bed, still searching for her mom’s Bible verse.
“I don’t think it’s wrong, I think it’s a recipe for mediocrity.”
Her eyebrows came together in a deep frown. “And you know
how I loathe the mediocre.”
I sat down beside her. “It’s just no way to really live.”
“If you say so,” her tone was affable, but I knew she didn’t
agree with me. ***
Maggie stared up at the ceiling from the far right side of the
bed. She was allowed to sleep in the middle now, but she couldn’t get her limbs to move. It was ironic, considering all that she had just left behind. She’d been doing nothing but moving, running, it felt like, for
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some time now. She guessed that was why she was exhausted at 7 P.M. Maggie rubbed her eyes and peered at the moving splotches of blue vertigo forming in front of her face like a child. Despite the corporate job and the daughter on the way, she had never been able to see herself as anything else. She curled up on her side and stared at nothing. The baby kicked and she jumped. Maggie wanted to distance herself from the feeling, but how do you escape something that’s inside of you? She opened the first drawer of the bedside table and took out her phone. Fourteen missed calls and twenty unread text messages. She didn’t want to read them. She knew what they’d say. Where are you? I’m
scared. This isn’t funny. Where are you? How could you, how could you, how could you? It was easier than she thought it would be, to leave, once she decided to do it. You really don’t need to pack much if you’re trying to get away from the life you’ve constructed.
Maggie knew that she could’ve afforded a nicer hotel but she
didn’t want to pick somewhere that he might check. She put her phone back in the drawer. As she pulled her hand back, her palm grazed the leather cover of a book. She took it out and stared at the Bible for a few minutes, never cracking it open.
A lot of mothers don’t love their baby until they see it, she
reminded herself. There’s still so much time for your feelings to change. She pretended that she didn’t feel the dread and fear swirling in her body. Why did she have to have the worst luck in the goddamn world? What kind of joke was this? To make the unmarried 26-year-old, who’d never even babysat before, pregnant with a little girl that was going to
26
need her? Maggie had worked hard to make sure that no one was ever reliant on her—at least not completely. She felt hated by something.
Her hand unconsciously moved and opened the Bible to a ran-
dom page, practically of its own volition. She read the cold, dead text in front of her nose and laughed. “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Victoria McIntyre
Liam P. Bryant
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gardening
At first, when he started the garden, he didn’t consider it a
substitute for children. He was only twenty-nine, after all. There was time for a marriage, and a house, and children. There was time for everything. Sure, he wasn’t attractive, and OK, his personality was bad, but someone would probably like him enough to marry him. For a long time he was even sure of it. Then, for a long time, he wasn’t sure of it, and after that there were months when he went back and forth, often in the same day, between thinking that someone would like him enough to marry him and that someone would not like him enough to marry him.
One day he finally decided to stop worrying about all that.
One day, he thought, I’ll start a garden.
When he got home from his walk he watched YouTube videos
and read gardening blogs. They were helpful. They taught him how to ready his dirt, and the proper way to plant, and how much to water. They warned him about rabbits, and how pesky they are, and about caterpillars and slugs, and the merits of insecticide. But he ignored that. He would be glad to have a few rabbits, and besides, he didn’t trust himself with poison.
First he picked a kind of flower. His favourites were tulips;
the way they survive the winter, returning to life in the spring. But it was already June, and so he decided to plant petunias. Not as many as the people in the videos, but a few, maybe five or six. He didn’t want
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to take on too much responsibility. That’s what he told the person at Home Depot, that he didn’t want too much responsibility, and the person laughed and said, OK. They put four petunias in the cart, which already had in it one of those tiny shovels and tiny dirt rakes, and went to look at composts.
When he got home, he put on his mother’s sun hat and one of
his father’s long-sleeved shirts, and because he forgot to buy gardening gloves he wore the thick padded winter ones that he used to build snowmen. He dug holes, and placed the petunias into the holes, and then because they seemed so far away from each other and because he didn’t want them to be lonely, he took them out and dug new holes. Petunias are sociable flowers! said one YouTube video. He thought that would be good, to have sociable flowers in his garden. He imagined baby rabbits, and caterpillars turning into butterflies, and the petunias with their roots all knotted up under the dirt. Maybe he would get some tulips, too, and plant them now instead of October, just to give them some extra time to grow.
He spent every evening for the next month tending his gar-
den. He got home from work, changed into the long-sleeved shirt and sunhat, put on his gloves, and went out to water his petunias. He made sure they still had all five petals, and then he sat with them. He sat for an hour, maybe, with his legs crossed, looking at the petals and at the petunias’ little bodies, and looking at the other, older things in the garden, like the old bush, or the old gnome holding a WELCOME sign, or the Toad House that never had any toads in it. For that first month,
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his petunias were healthy, and everything was fine.
Then he started naming them.
At first he named them sparingly, and even then only literally:
a petunia named Petunia, a bush named Bush.
President Bush, he thought. Ha ha.
But then he named the others. And since he couldn’t call all
four of the petunias Petunia, he had an issue. He couldn’t call them Petunia One, Petunia Two, and so on—that wouldn’t be right, morally or ethically, or something. And he couldn’t take away the names he had already given, so that nobody had a name, because deep down he would always think of that petunia as Petunia, and that bush as Bush. And so he named one of the petunias Lily, and another he named Lydia, and the fourth he named Marlene, after his grandmother who was dead. And so that no one was left out, he named the gnome holding the WELCOME sign Franz.
The toad house remained the Toad House, and empty.
Now, in the evenings, when he sat down to his garden, he
nodded at each of the petunias in turn, and then at Bush, and then at Franz, and as he did he greeted them by name. At first he did this only in his head, and with a bit of irony. Then one day, during a heat wave, when the members of his garden were in some discomfort, he whispered their names, and said, Here’s a little water.
By August he was saying their names out loud, as if to a baby,
or a dog. He greeted them, and said goodbye to them, and spoke to them. He did not expect conversation. He wasn’t crazy. People online
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said they did the same. It helps them grow, PetuniaMamma021 wrote. He was helping them grow.
When he was little, he liked playing pretend. He and his
sister had a toy kitchen, and a chalkboard, and sometimes they played restaurant and sometimes they played school. He was the teacher or the cook. Sometimes, when he was the teacher, they had whole classrooms with stuffed animals for students. Over time, the longer they played, these animals began having personalities: rebellious Ricky, or keen Katie. In the same way, the members of his garden began taking on personalities of their own. Lily and Lydia, for instance, were always whispering about Franz. They thought Franz was cute. Petunia was bright, and serious, and kept to herself. And Marlene, though bright and though probably kind at heart, was only interested in making jokes about others. She and Bush laughed at everyone else, including him. They called him names, like Fucking Loser, and said he was pathetic. He was a good sport about it, and laughed along, but sometimes it hurt, like when they said he should be dead.
In September, on the first day of the month, he decided to
make some changes. Good changes, like improvements and growth. He got a butterfly net, and a Tupperware container, and he went to the creek in the woods near his house where he played when he was little. He moved slowly along the water, stepping on stones and turning over leaves. It used to be this creek was filled with toads—so many that often what you thought was just a rock would surprise you, would come to life before you, if only to get away, until eventually you could never
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be sure what was living and what was dead, and so you had to assume everything was alive if only to be safe. Now everything seemed dead. Mosquitos landed on his neck and legs. Lots of blue clouds covered the sky, and it was so humid, and far away there were little crackles of thunder. He dipped his butterfly net into the creek and began sifting the dirt and stones. He sifted for a long time, and felt like one of those boat drivers in Venice with the long sticks. It was while thinking about Venice and about streets calmly filling up with water that he found one, brown and spotted, with the creek running gently all around it. He got the lid off the Tupperware, which had in it a leaf and a twig, scooped up the toad, and started back.
At home he nudged the toad into the Toad House. WEL-
COME, said Franz. The toad was still. He tried tickling it with the twig, and speaking softly to it, and giving it bits of grass. He thought maybe it was hurt, or shocked, or sad. It didn’t look sad. Its neck bulged when it breathed, and once it even did a ribbit. But then again it hadn’t eaten the leaf or played with the twig, and when he’d found it it had just been sitting in all that water. And so maybe, then, he was actually saving it, from sadness or self-harm, by giving it a better home and new friends. It looked parched, but before he could water it, or introduce it to its new neighbours, the sky flashed. It began to rain, and he went inside.
All through the night it rained, and in the morning, having
hardly slept, he set out for work. He’d spent much of the night thinking about his garden—its residents and community, and his plans for the future. Even still he smiled to think of it. He did not notice that the
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lawn, as he crossed it, soaked his shoes. He did not notice that the Toad House was empty.
Lydia had been torn from her dirt and left there, her roots
mangled, her petals scattered. She was dead. His mouth filled with spit. He was going to vomit. He was on his knees, in the mud, with his hands cupped over his mouth and nose, and he felt like he was going to vomit. The other flowers were fine. The others, if anything, seemed not to have noticed. He shut his eyes and breathed. Hadn’t he been warned, by the people in the videos, and by the person at Home Depot? Think about a fence, the person told him. Think about rabbits and raccoons. Well, he hadn’t. He’d wanted rabbits. He’d wanted them to hop in his garden, and be with his flowers.
Now, this.
He scraped a hole into the dirt. He lowered Lydia’s body into
the hole, then moved the dirt back into place. He was silent for some time. Then he took the twig that had been in the Tupperware and stuck it upright at the head of the grave.
That evening he went one last time to Home Depot to buy
fencing and some wooden stakes. He asked the person about rabbits, and foxes, and toads, and the person said, Rabbits, maybe rabbits. Then the person suggested insecticide. They showed him again the different kinds, and told him how they worked. They said, Maybe this one, and he nodded and put it into the cart. Then, at home, with his breath coming up in clouds, he got to work. He hammered the stakes, and unraveled the fencing. He tied the fencing to the stakes. He said, Look, I
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am right here, there is nothing to worry about, it’s just a little fence, to keep you safe, and happy. He said, Look, we’re still together. I’m right here. It’s OK. It’s OK.
Then he phoned his office. He left a message saying he was
very, very sick, so sick he might have to go to the hospital, and that he would be away for at least the rest of the week. He hung up, dragged a chair from the kitchen to the front room, pulled back the curtains of the bay windows overlooking the garden, and sat there for a long time, watching and waiting and thinking, and did not fall asleep.
Connor Bennett
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Lauren Laisying
35
surfacing
You see two boys with thick necks and they are good for now.
One is carrying a gigantic stuffed toy of Scooby-Doo, the grand size of it is offset by cheap imitation of the actual cartoon it is. The mother looks like them—short, round in the middle, same thick neck—and they are smiling as they look for their seats, walking past the three empty ones in front of you. Her plump hands rest on the shoulders of the youngest boy as the elder leads them through the aisle, carrying the giant dog with pride.
You arrived early and scored that overhead luggage, but there’s
a man next to you and he tries tricking you out of your aisle seat. Usually you’re willing to put up with a lot of things, but travelling makes you colder, more reptilian. So you smile a close-lipped smile and shake your head at him. The mother and her two sons return to the empty seats and she has her ticket out now with the seat number printed on it. The older boy who was leading before seems slightly embarrassed. The mother notices all the overhead bins on her row are now full because they came too late, they came with Scooby-Doo. Her voice becomes increasingly forceful with the inattentive flight attendant. It’s as if she has practiced standing her ground in front of a full-length mirror and is testing it out now. The flight attendant is tall, chic, and stunningly unhelpful.
The mother’s boys are quiet, with two large roll on suitcases.
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God, you think to yourself, have they never flown economy before? Two pieces of luggage with a giant stuffed dog? They are silent still as their mother has to settle for a non-answer to the problem. You turn away and adjust your neck pillow. The man next to you has taken over the shared armrest, the crook of his elbow spitefully close to you.
Through the gaps in the seats you can them see them. The
boys have both turned on the small TV set and are flipping through the channels. God, they’ll just turn that off in a minute, you can’t help but think. You skip the safety video and try to nap before takeoff. As you drift off you remember how you and your brother would mime all the actions of the video together. But that was a different time, a different airline, and now the family is different. You jolt awake and are pleased to notice that you’re in the air.
During the inflight meals you see the kids guzzle down can af-
ter can of soda as you head to the bathroom. There is a line so you keep staring at their row, casually, not bothering to hide your gaze; somehow you know they will not notice. The mother forgets her rough behaviour as she watches the movie enraptured, the light from the screen is in her eyes and she looks almost pretty. But in the bathroom, you can’t help but imagine—you wipe the excess urine off of the bowl before squatting over it—that the faint embarrassment is clinging to her and that everybody can see it. You wash your hands and wonder if it’s just you who thinks this way, and you wonder if there’s any way to stop. Your reflection in the small mirror strikes you under the harsh lights: sallow skin, browned and blackened in patches, dark, dark eyes. You turn
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towards the direction of your seat a bit bleary, starry eyed. You realize you looked like your own mother just then.
On the way back turbulence strikes and for a moment you
are weightless, both feet off the ground, which gives you a thrill. You giggle, a girlish burst, and the man next to you is startled, as if he didn’t think you capable of it. You see the mother make her sons put on their seatbelts. The cabin stars have been activated, they illuminate the ceiling and alleviate some of the pressure in your head. Your mouth feels dry. You think about ordering something with alcohol in it. After all, you’re the legal age to drink everywhere in the world now; in some parts you just made it, and in others it’s old news. That takes the thrill out of it and your face feels puffy so you go to sleep again without fastening on your seatbelt. The choppy motions of the aircraft feel like a lullaby.
This time you wake up and you can’t go back to sleep. You
watch the younger boy watch the same movie for what feels like the hundredth time—you question how time passes in fourteen-hour flights, if it does at all. He’s watching a sci-fi movie featuring a diverse cast that all look like good friends. The production looks cheap but the acting is earnest. It would have captivated you at that age too, and a flash of worry hits you in the chest for the boy who is entirely too short and too thick for the world as he stares hungrily at the PG-13 onscreen kiss. Oh, buddy that’s not going to happen for you, you think unkindly. Though science fiction is a good choice for him; it won’t be a terrible life.
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During the landing the boys carry a suitcase each, with the
fake Scooby-Doo on proud display. The flimsy glitter of their matching red jersey shirts dazzles you as the lights are turned back on. They look clear skinned and wide-eyed, so very trusting and round. Their mother strokes both their heads as she shepherds them forward. For some reason you don’t think they’re going to make it and you don’t think you are either. You wish that patch of turbulence just brought you all down; it would have been the kindest ending. You could’ve crashed down to the ground like your dad let you that one time. How he looked at you with that ticking jaw, taking you off the floor, by the armpits, and into the air—just like flying.
You run into them again later, at the mouth of the gate, and
they are all breathless. They can’t find the connecting board, or more accurately, they don’t understand it.
“Please, how to find?” the mother asks, showing you her
boarding pass. You wait till their destination pops up and point them to their gate. All three thank you profusely, sincerely.
“No problem!” You say with a smile you hope is genial, gener-
ous, magnanimous.
The younger boy waves at you shyly and they head off togeth-
er with Scooby-Doo, the elder leading confidently again and the mother holding the younger’s hand. You swing your gaze back to the black surface of the connection board, all those foreign names of foreign countries you’ll never go to, you never want to go to, changing instantly. The red of all the “Gate Closing” is in your eyes. You see the reflection of
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your face on the board and your smile is strained.
Kazi Moquit
Liam P. Bryant
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modern blob Content Warning: body horror
When people thought of {--}, they tended to think of big,
hanging slabs of meat winding and unwinding in deli windows and walk-in freezers, mindlessly gaping with the vague impression of otherworldly intelligence, stupefying their observers with the same oppressive sense of knowledge as rock faces and cloud covers. For the sake of their polite upbringings, those who made this connection tended not to think much of their unconscious comparison, attributing it instead to idle and meaningless wanderings. Of course, though there was something to it, {--} was hulking; he seemed to be scaled up and out and his face was, not to put too fine a point on it, always blank. Occasionally he would find himself in a rundown diner or deserted convenience store on the receiving end of the patronizing smile of a service provider who thought she (it’s usually women who pick up on whatever it is that’s a little off about {--}) was serving someone pretty significantly inebriated. {--} knows that people think this of him and sometimes when he’s waited through just enough, “///honey///Do you have enough money/// are you meeting someone here///are you sure you don’t want a refill on that coffee?” drawled out just slowly enough for it to really register, to really make him feel bad, he’ll try to dispel the blear from his eyes and close his always-agape jaw. On those occasions, he’ll answer whatever question has been posed to him the second it’s vocalized, making
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whoever he’s talking to feel like the dumb one; he’ll tap his fingers and lower his brow as if he’s thinking about something pressing and late to something not quite as worthy of his time. The waitress///busdriver///acquaintance will flush and pick up their own pace of thinking/// moving///speaking which had previously developed a fat, lazy breed of superiority. They’ll wonder if they had imagined just how far away {--} had seemed.
{--}’s friends thought he was dumb and his closer friends
thought he was always in deep thought. Neither, strictly speaking, was correct. On this particular afternoon, {--} was fairly unsuccessfully folded into the too-small dining chair of a friend who had always, fairly inaccurately, assumed him to be a prodigy. {--} shifted in his chair and, with some difficulty, uncrossed the leg that had begun to levitate his side of the dining table, sending a salt and pepper shaker sliding down to the girl across from him. The girl, deep in her own reveries, had both palms sitting perpendicular to the table as a sort of fleshy makeshift wall. {--} carefully slid each of his legs off the seat of the chair and allowed the heels of his socks to slide down the floor until he straddled the chair with straight knees; no part of his body touched the dining table.
His friend remained pensive for some time and then sat up
suddenly, knocking the table with her own, considerably shorter, legs. She usually pushed away the gleam in her eyes when she was with {--} in the hopes that he would also think she was smart and refined but it returned now, all of a sudden and with an accusatory twist.
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“Why do you never tell me what you’re thinking?”
He would have answered immediately but his tongue was run-
ning up and down the roof of his mouth, so he waited for it to finish. When his tongue had at last nestled itself among his bottom teeth, he said:
“Because I’m not, thinking… usually.”/// ///{--} sat way in the back of the bus in the leftmost seat of a
row of three. Someone sat uncomfortably in the rightmost seat. The seat beside him was, or should have been, empty. He spilled into it, his arm lolling over the grody fabric and the muscle of his thigh and butt squished shaplessly over what seemed like half of its surface area; the other half of his body wedged into the space between the wall and his seat and fit itself into the bus’s squared edge. This all gave him an off-puttingly asymmetrical appearance, like a distorted right triangle. {--}’s empty gaze sprawled in a similar way, covering the entire distance from himself to a young man who stood several feet in front of him. The man snuck occasional uncomfortable glances at the hunk of person before him in a plea for him to follow social convention and avert eye contact. Unsuccessful, he met eyes with the woman at the other end of {--}’s row who seemed to be similarly uncomfortable. She got up slowly and carefully, leaning on the walls of the bus for support. She was an elderly woman, usually trusting and warm, but she didn’t trust {--} and wanted nothing to do with his heavy, blank stare. As the woman began to walk away, making a move from the wall to the pole, the bus lurched to a stop.
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The woman spilled forward and {--} held up his hand. His
fingers seemed to fit perfectly below and between her ribs, bracing the loose skin of her torso. Balanced there, against {--}’s stout fingers and locked wrist, the fear she had felt earlier melted from her bones, through her clothes, fleeing from the hands of its object. It evaporated into the body of the bus, permeating the air with a heavy, gaseous discomfort. Her anxiety had been transmuted and dispersed. The other passengers watched with an unease foreign to themselves. When she broke away from {--} an indeterminable amount of time later, the space on her stomach where his hand had rested felt cold as ice and alien from the rest of her body. She nodded genially at {--}, who paused and then nodded back at her with a sloppy, open-mouthed smile. He held out his hand for her to shake, the same hand he had caught her with, but she backed away and shook her head at his hand. {--} understood, blinked in acknowledgment///twitch///habit, curled his fingers into a fist and sheathed the fist in his pocket. She wasn’t scared anymore, but she really didn’t want to touch him again. She imagined that she could see the afterimage of her guts on his hand. She pictured that the blood missing from her cold belly coated the part of him that had touched her. Her intestines, she thought, were gone from her stomach, after all, something had to be missing. She thought that they were draped over his sticky, pale skin, oozing her blood, at a comfortable but somehow unnaturally slow speed that reminded her, subconsciously of course, of the speed at which that big open grin had wrapped around his face a moment ago. Like he had reached through her and caught her at the
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spine instead of the front of her blouse. Her own guts would have been proffered back to her, for her to say goodbye, to touch them one last time in the brotherly grip of a handshake. She did not want to touch them///
///Claire’s hand was at {--}’s chin. She scratched gently at the
wide expanse of flesh stretched over his face, trying and failing to feel for a grain of hair beneath his skin. {--}’s arms hung limp and apeish by his sides and Claire used the lateral room this afforded to make up for her confinement on two sides. The already too-small chair was pushed back against the dining room wall to make room for her to sit straddling {--}; her body was sandwiched between the edge of the table and the rolls of his torso. She was fascinated with the doughiness of his skin and stretched it between her fingers roughly. {--} sat stone-still and Claire stared at the latticework of red over his blank skin, like faint leopard print. From a distance the two colors blurred together, the pink faded into the white and gave him a slight charismatic flush. Claire pressed down and watched her fingerprint appear and then fade. {--} forgot about his body as Claire sat astride him, focusing only on his breaths. His body seemed to him to disappear completely, only to reappear in a trail after his breath. Breathe out; nothing. Breathe in; lips; teeth; tongue licking at each new breath like a wild animal, the only part of him to move///not his or a part of him in its unpredictability; throat; lungs; a trace of his body, skeletal arteries and veins, capillaries. A ghostly form is his only hint as to where he is, what he’s doing. The part of himself he knows flickers like a series of candles lost in the mid-
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dle of wide, cavernous tunnels, the light of one barely touching that of the next, not even suggesting walls. Breathe out; fading; nothing. Breathe in. Claire’s hand touches his lips as he sucks air through the natural gape of his mouth and the image of his body shifts to accept her fingers. His breath touches her fingertips, and everything his breath touches is the part of himself he knows. Her fingers are sealed to him in a puckered glue of melded flesh. Her skin is yellower than his lips and the place between them seems an orangey horizon line in a violently beautiful sunrise. Claire is transfixed, unable to begin to comprehend that their bodies have become part of one another///that her body has become part of his///that his body has become part of hers. When she moves her wrist up over {--}’s mouth, her nails hang over the thin, visible part of his lip and into his mouth, the tips of her nails rest on the part of his skin below his lip and the backs of her nails against his bottom teeth. She keeps them there for a moment and then {--} breathes in again. Claire’s nails calcify and cement into his teeth and the tips into that smooth, unnaturally dry piece of skin under and behind his bottom lip– sticky and aired out from his mouth-breathing. She can wiggle her nails back and forth without totally removing the tips of her fingers and the tips of her nails from their base in his pliable skin or at all moving their backs from the yellowey, translucent cement they’re planted in. The way her fingers roll back and forth without getting their bearings reminds her of a horseshoe crab stuck on its back. She can picture fourteen little clawed legs sprouting from the pads of each of her fingers, kicking uselessly against the inside of {--}’s mouth. The
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image strikes her as funny///horrific///symbolic enough to laugh at and {--} remains slack-jawed for an uncharacteristically short second before picking up on her laughter and joining in to ease the anxiety which had gathered over their shoulders.
Claire’s fingers are in {--}’s mouth. Her nails feel recently pol-
ished and her fingertips uncalloused; she pulls her fingers from between {--}’s now sealed lips and stares at them for a while, marveling at their normality. For some reason she feels like they shouldn’t be whole///hers. {--} grabs her hand in his own and her fingers are gone from her sight and with it her unease. {--} breathes out through his nose and rests his head against the wall behind him; his uncomfortably sealed mouth falls agape again///
/// {--} is playing strip poker with a smattering of people he’s
one or two degrees separated from, or was, until they all gathered in what is presumably one of theirs or one of one of their acquaintance’s dilapidated living areas to drink and strip. The ambiance is deeply meditative; the room is dark and everyone is drunk, in a stupor of his or her own thoughts. It would be a stretch to call the sprawled out, mindless dusting of players excited for the game. Most of them aren’t particularly aware of the state of dress or undress of anyone in the room; each seems to ignore his hand of cards until another nudges him into playing. {--} sits in the center of a dark stain on the carpet. The stain is recent enough that you can see a thin membrane of liquid above the carpet which had ostensibly exceeded its capacity to absorb. The same substance travels up the seat of {--}’s pants and the fabric sticks to his
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thighs. He picks at it carefully, attempting to separate the khaki from the leg it so perfectly encases; all of his pants are like this no matter what size, his big legs just barely slide into the space for them so that every pore seems to be visible through the fabric clinging tight around them.
His wide hand eclipses his cards and the others forget he’s
playing, skipping him in their odd, elliptic rotation. When Claire stumbles into the room, making good on her promise to meet up with them after she had hit one or two more bars, she pins {--}’s heavy sweater and soiled pants under the gaze she hadn’t yet learned to dull. Immediately assessing the undress of the others in the room, she peers over his slab of a shoulder and takes tally of his cards.
“Have you not lost a single hand? How is that possible?” Her
voice is loud and competitive, tugging the others out of their trances. They turn towards {--} as one unit, seeing him for the first time even as {--} neglects to see them back.
“Dude, that’s not fair.”
“You would not still have a shirt on if you were playing for
real. You should take off at least your sweater and shirt to catch up.” Claire giggles out her demand, but it’s unmistakably a demand. {--} closes his eyes, they seem to bulge against his eyelids and then sink back into his skull when he opens them again. They make this change rapidly, like the switching of a frame on an analog movie. {--} turns his head slowly to face Claire and forces a smile onto his habitually blank face. She smiles back naturally which casts the unease of his expression into
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stark focus. When {--} doesn’t make a move to break their one-sided eye contact or shift his face to match the nuances of her own, she smiles almost in awe– a first hint of the glorification that will come to plenty in their relationship– and sits down cross legged, just at the edge of his puddle. She seems not to notice. He doesn’t.
{--} slowly and deliberately takes off his sweater and places
it folded by his left hand. The others in the room have moved on from their temporary anger at {--}’s abstention; similarly their brief contemplative mood in Claire’s absence and {--}’s presence has passed and they have broken into raucous companionship, leaving only Claire and {--} silent. {--} lifts his cotton t-shirt over his head and his stomach distends as he raises the cloth. Claire watches as his belly and chest seem to stretch to fill the space vacated by {--}’s long-sleeved t-shirt and at first she is fascinated. His pink, hairless chest looks taut and unexercised. Claire can’t pinpoint any fat or muscle on his body and his torso appears a cartilage cage around his skeleton. She backs away unconsciously///pointedly, not wanting him to touch her. She says as much, “What the fuck?” Her tone is lathered with revulsion and {--} is shocked. He looks around anxiously at the others in the room and his belly bulges and shrinks; it looks as though he were about to give birth. It ripples and waves and undulates from the defined pole of his pant waist like it’s made of jello. The shivering seems a hard response to some flexing of the rigid anatomy beneath his puddles of skin. Claire stares fixated at the kicking phantom fetus of his chest, seemingly preparing herself to scream, and {--}’s anxious expression melts from his bones. He is
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featureless, his eyes are half-lidded and dry as bone. He blinks. Claire screams.
Everyone in the room is up and defensive, someone has an arm
around Claire; someone other than Claire is screaming now. {--} is still sitting. The puddle under him has grown and appears luminous in the room’s dim lighting. {--} blinks again. He breathes in and out. With his breaths come fine vapors. They crowd into the room’s cluttered corners. His breath’s excretion clusters heavy and overbearing between heads. {--} breathes. The room begins to still///
///{--} practices opening and closing his jaw. It hurts him.
It feels like arrows through his bones. He does it until it doesn’t hurt anymore. His jaw clicks as it closes. The pieces of skin at the top and the bottom of his mouth each stick to his tongue; it feels bad. {--} cracks his fingers and blinks and breathes. He touches his big, smooth fingertips to his neatly trimmed toenails, they’re slightly malleable and blush pink when he presses down. He runs his fingertips up his calves, feeling their perfect taper out and then back in again at his knee. His knee bends back and forth smoothly and his joint seems totally mobile, so mobile in fact that the way his leg refuses to move past 180 degrees seems unnatural and artificial. {--} continues this appraisal up his body. He fingers his own rubbery skin and tries out each joint and extremity; slowly and pointedly he curls and uncurls himself. He doesn’t seem to react as he does this but his body feels bad and hurts. As he touches himself, a somatic feeling like tears or vomit welling up inside and against him accumulates through his insides. The feeling twitches and
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tugs at his body, causing some of him to pucker or twist in protest. Naked and looming, arms twisted, face blank, {--} cries out in what can only be pain. The sound is deep and guttural, seemingly tortured; {--}’s wail carries the distinct timbre of a desperate plea. You could almost think he was praying, on his knees///subjugated to a god.
The///prayer\\\seems to come from nowhere///outside of him,
outside of the room///. He is still and blank; his face looks, as always, borrowed from a dead man. His mouth hangs the same degree of agape. It doesn’t move with his sound. If you pressed your hand flat into the front of his neck, hard enough so that you sunk into it and the rest of the skin on his throat bulged over and around you, you’d feel a dim buzzing, your hand would tickle and maybe the buzzing would just be your blood rushing through your fingers as your heart rate spiked and that would be it. The wail would be just as pained and just as distant even as you held yourself close to his body. Maybe you’d get used to the scream, maybe you’d tune it out and hear his body. You’d hear his big, thumping heart. His heart is slow, scaled down to match his movements or vice versa, his movements coordinated to the thud of his heart/// ///“Claire?” Claire doesn’t notice the way he breaks her name into four syllables: ‘cuh, le, eh, re,’ only the distinctive twang of the finished product. He speaks like an artist running a brush through four shades lined up shoulder to shoulder; each barely touches the next, tangent at only one point. His tongue licks purposely from paint to paint, slowly and neatly creating a sunset of the shades. The deliberate slur of letters culminates at Claire’s ear and she turns to him expectantly. The
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surprise and gratitude is clear and readable on Claire’s face but goes unrecognized by {--} who had already forgotten his call to her.
“Yes.” Claire’s voice is imbued with a slightly diluted level
of the same awe that {--} missed in her expression a second prior. He closes his jaw, cracks his knuckles, rolls his eyes around in his head. It doesn’t hurt anymore. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. “What is it, Casey?” {--}’s chin dips against his neck and his head against his shoulder. The excess of his skin and fat, distended by the weight of his skull, creates a cushion for the side of his face and he looks to be buried inside of his own collarbone, peering out from the cloud of his double chin. ///“Casey?///Casey!///What do you want Casey?”/// Claire’s voice picks and picks at him, the sound of her spittle as she opens and closes her mouth accumulates at the bottom of his belly and sloshes back as she leans towards him in her constant sway. He feels something wet and pasty like vomit seeping from the space between his scalp and his skull down the sides of his face’s interior as she talks. It’s like a gelatinous facsimile of nervous sweat stuck and itchy behind his skin. The pressure against his skin builds up and up and his face swells like it’s infected. “I don’t know, Claire. I was going to ask you when I knew.” {--}’s voice is warped from the position of his neck and mouth, deep inside the rest of his body. Low and gravely, he repeats himself, the closest he gets to frantic. “I don’t know, Claire.”
Claire opens her mouth to respond and {--} touches her arm,
shakes his head.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean, are you telling me
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Sayaka Daly
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not to talk? You can’t do that///Casey. I can talk whenever I want/// Casey///Casey!” Something like a kettle is screaming in {--}’s ears, his grip on her arm tightens, tightens. He thinks of the woman on the bus, how he saw what she saw///she understood what he understood. His grip on her arm tightens. He thinks of Claire screaming that day and how in control he had been. He thinks of himself screaming and how out of control he had been///could be again///how normal he had felt to be in tune with his misery. His grip on her arm tightens. Claire and {--} scream together. Her voice is shrill and present, her mouth shuddering with the effort of her voice. {--}’s voice, however, is everywhere except his tongue, it booms through the room, bouncing from wall to wall. To Claire, Casey’s voice seems to sit right by her ear, peering over the back of her neck looking at her empty hands. It sends goosebumps up her neck, across her shoulders, and down her arms in instinctual empathy/// fear.
She looks down at the arm that {--} is holding and her scream
cuts off abruptly///
///The sun is setting. {--} wants to hold it in his hands///have
it///eat it. He reaches up and up and up until his fingertips graze the sun’s blazing surface and then stretches further. He stretches his arm higher until his big shoulder distends and dislocates in a way totally unfamiliar to him. It feels sharp and incorrect, like his body failed to respond adequately to him. It burns just like his fingers over the fire of the sun, but he’s tall enough. He caresses the hard swell of the sun like it’s a globe or plaster model just too big for him to pluck from the sky.
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He can feel its heat and he wants to to be closer///to swallow it///for it to be inside of him. He tells himself the sun is too far away for this to be real. He stands cradling the sun, reminding himself of the millions of miles of dead space he can’t see. He tells himself that he must be dreaming or delusional///
///His fingers are through Claire’s bicep. Her flesh has parted
and been cauterized with new, gluey flesh in the wake of his hand so that the new shape of her arm comes with four big oval gaps just the right size for {--}’s presence. He pushes his fingers further, breaking past the slight resistance of her weight. Claire is silent, dumbfounded by the sight of {--}’s hand through her arm. It burns a little when he digs his fingers further through her muscle but mostly she only feels his touch. And it’s all around her. It’s inside of her. She feels surrounded and stifled and overwhelmed from the inside out. {--} has pushed his fingers through the skin on the back of her arm and meets his fingers with his thumb. As she stares, too shocked to scream or move, the top of his thumb, past his knuckle crawls outward, unfurling to a full length probably equal to that of his middle finger if held straight. He wraps the top joints of his other fingers, sticking out from the holes in her arm, around his thumb. The skin at his fingers grows warm and tacky and merges gracefully enough that Claire doesn’t realize what’s happened until she blinks and he doesn’t have fingers or a hand, but one continuous circle of flesh around and inside of her arm. She thinks of the magic kit she had as a kid and the big linking silver rings. She pictures opening up the kit to circles of skin and body. She imagines
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they would crawl up her body, swallow her arms. She pictures herself as a child in a polyester magician’s Halloween costume, struggling against the weight of fleshy pendulous rings to hold up a deck of cards. She pictures the horror of her audience.
The part of Claire’s upper arm that {--}’s allotted for himself
doesn’t begin to fill the circle that his big, long fingers make around her. There’s similar space around the bodies of his fingers where he wiggled and diverged from the area he now occupies. This hollow part is the worst for her. Her face twitches into a distorted mockery of a sob for a split second and then snaps back. She moves her upper arm in the minimal capacity she is capable of and feels the gentle grating of his flesh on hers and she again breaks out in gooseflesh. The sensation is unnerving and consuming, the touch equivalent of nails on a chalkboard but inside of her head.
She had forgotten he was screaming; his wail had become her
universe’s ontological soundtrack. It’s only mark on her conscious mind was a pervading sense of discomfort. She had, however, become aware of the slow sound of his heartbeat as it consumed her. The hammering rhythm tracked the motion of his grip as it tightened and her own heart, self-conscious of its own speed and unpredictability, beat faster. Claire notices the sound of the scream when he stops. His breaths are everywhere, manic and sluggish simultaneously. {--} clogs his throat with a layer of mucus to block the sound of his panic and braces himself on Claire’s arm. The morphed remains of his hand tightens further and constricts onto her bicep. She sees it coming before it happens;
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the burning is bad. She blinks and remembers for the first time///understands for the first time minutes prior when her hand had become a part of his mouth. It hadn’t burned that time, maybe, she thinks, because he wasn’t angry then///
///When Claire first met {--}, she was enchanted by the way he
took up space. She watched him consume the room’s air, eliminate the possibility of dead space while remaining innocuous and forgettable: more an object than a person. She wanted to call him dense, but that wasn’t exactly right; it just seemed impossible that anything could exist in the area he occupied. It seemed impossible that his big, still body wasn’t totally filled up and packed down. She pictured his blood, bones and organs squished and oozing into each other through every square inch of his body and it seemed more right than the idea that he could have a body like anyone else’s. She remembered wanting to touch him and feel his cool gluey flesh. She quickly came to feel possessive of his mystique. She felt jealous and angry when others looked at the graceful, unhinged way his loaves of fingers moved, even though it was usually with dumb fascination. She wanted to accommodate him into herself and to own his otherworldly largeness. She wanted to see and understand him as a part of herself///
///{--} wants to calm down. He had thought letting himself
grow angry would be good for him///be okay but he doesn’t like the way it feels anymore. Something far below his lethargy shakes, exploding in a continual display of muffled fireworks. He braces himself on Claire’s body, holding tight around her head and arm to stabilize himself and
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to still his heart. He doesn’t look at her but focuses on the blood in his veins. He wants the punishing race of his circulation to stop but he can’t make himself abandon it. He has become too accustomed to beating his own heart.
His arms are wrapped awkwardly around Claire, snaked
disjointedly around her torso but his hands don’t budge from their position on her body. He holds her tight to his center in a gross parody of an embrace.
Claire doesn’t really feel conscious. It’s as though she’s almost
asleep. It’s very hard for her to parse what’s real and what’s assumption///dream. Her body feels trapped and light and out of her control. Maybe she feels like an infant or like a bug or like a long, still shot of the sky. Her body burns and her eyes tear up but {--}’s skin acts as a cooling balm and the weight of his body a blanket. She wants to burrow inside his chest; she imagines it will part for her like a mucus braced with thin, pliable wires. She imagines the inside of his body is cool and dark.
“You can do it if you want. You can eat me if you want. I
think I want that.” She thinks she spoke only after the words dance before her and, hearing them outloud, she’s aghast at her own plea. She doesn’t want that; she wants to move her heavy, trapped arms. She wants to walk. Eat her, she thinks, eat her. Claire doesn’t understand why she would say that or where it had even come from. She’s overwhelmed and suffocating on a piece of skin that doesn’t seem to belong to a body part and what she really wants is to have one///her body
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again. She wants to scream. She wants to scream but she doesn’t think that she can. In fact, she doesn’t think she can talk.
Claire doesn’t know where her mouth is. She doesn’t know
how she had spoken before, how she put words to the weird state of contentment in which she had found herself. She thinks hard to the moment before and tries to picture her mouth moving, she tries to feel the tingling wake of sensation that must have passed through her ears. It’s foreign and false; Claire is totally convinced that she must have never spoken aloud except for the fact that {--} is nodding: “I know,” he says over and over and over again; each time hits her like a wave. Each time polishes and prods and washes away at her. Claire shakes her head slowly and feels like she’s moving one thousand pounds; she’s heavy and lethargic and far away from her fear– drowning in {--}’s impossible acknowledgment.
{--} puts his thumb in Claire’s mouth and it is///grows to the
size of Claire’s mouth. It pushes at her teeth until they slip into his finger and she’s stuck around it, sucking through the gaps between her gums and his thumb for air. {--}’s finger expands in response to the air rushing past it; it seems to sate an inexplicable, instinctual need to fill the leftover empty space. {--}’s skin binds to Claire’s lips as she takes a deep harsh breath in, urging her lips past the start of her mouth and binding the weathered pink bridge between her blank face and the slimy inside of her mouth around the base of his thumb. Claire is left the unwilling parody of old age, toothless and withered.
She can’t breathe. {--} is focusing on his own breaths, the cir-
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culation of his own blood. Claire is too far away for him to notice that he’s been sucking her into him///sucking her into his orbit///consuming her. All he can do is focus. Unable to make a sound, Claire suffocates silently///
///{--}, bloated, rises carefully and decidedly from Claire’s
table. His steps are firm and he seems like a new person; the amorphous undulation that made his body looks so uncertain///omnipresent has concretized into a bullish wall of flesh. He brushes past the table as he lumbers through the room which is dwarfed by his mass and stops to watch it fall///teeter back and forth from its center of gravity again and again until it stills. His phone is deep in the pocket of his pants. The seam, obnoxiously loud and sharp alone in a room with {--}, rips when he forces it to accommodate the breadth of his forearm. {--} doesn’t notice. The screen of his phone is greasy despite his smooth, dry skin/// ///Claire’s mother, Lina, sits outside on a splintery bench, a towel protecting her legs and pants from the rain that had fallen the night before and is now stored in the heavy planks of wood. She watches the sky. It is beautiful and fiery orange from the setting sun.
On an instinct she doesn’t quite understand, she takes the
phone out of her worn canvas purse and holds her thumb on the power button. She keeps her phone shut off except for when she uses it. She watches with mild resentment as the screen turns white. With the phone placed flat on her thigh, she uses one finger to swipe open to her sparse homescreen.
Lina can’t bring herself to move long after she would have
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normally gone back inside. It’s getting dark outside and it’s no longer safe to be in the park alone. She stares at the afterimage of the sunset and tears prickle at her eyes. She rubs her fingers up and down the sides of her phone rhythmically, as though she’s soothing someone. She imagines that she’s rubbing her fingers up and down the back of an infant Claire. When the phone begins to ring, Lina doesn’t jump or look at the screen. The tears begin to stream freely down her face. Finally, she looks at the number on her phone: a meaningless jumble not saved in her contacts. When she answers her voice is strangled in a sob: “Claire?”///
///{--} is still standing straight in the center of the room, his
eyes are fixed on the back wall and his hand, of its own volition///not of his volition, slides open the phone. {--}’s eyes don’t move nor does his weight shift as his hand smoothly opens the phone app and types in an unfamiliar number. Still not looking, he presses the speaker button and holds the device by two fingers, hanging at his side. Greasy, it slips from where he had held it at its center and catches itself at the lip of the case. He listens to the voice on the other end blankly: “Claire?”
Beck Siegel
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Sayaka Daly
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north of may
You are holding three photographs in your hands.
You are standing at the edge of a dock. There is wind and there
is a moment when you can feel the wind. Some kind of song is playing. Maybe the cabin owner’s daughter is visiting.
No. The cabin owner has no daughters.
The sky is not blue here. Spring begins in feelings like brambles
and cold sweat. Take it off. Everything is sticky. There are blackbirds in the sky, or blue. You can’t tell because they are circling each other. Is this a dance? No. One bird looks like vengeance after all, and the other is a blur.
The wood is weak. No, your feet. Like the green. You’re
reminded of your piano at home. Maybe that’s why you think you can hear a melody. You drop a penny into the water by accident, but you’re glad. You can smell the copper.
You don’t go out too far. The waves are choppy because it’s
been raining for days. You don’t want to fall in. You don’t want to get your red coat soaked. The lake sways the dock and the dock sways you. You wonder if this is some kind of dance as well.
You find a few photo albums. You look at them. You realize
you want to go outside without being in a car. You want to sit next to a tree.
You think to yourself: there is no such thing as the smell of
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rain. Love wet air or wet dirt, but there is no real thing called petrichor. You came here to sleep in a house next to the water. Paid a lonely man a hundred dollars to do it and drove two hours, but you left the tiny gas stove on last night. Now it’s your last day here and it has finally stopped raining. So you go out to the docks.
You unravel film from an old camera you couldn’t get to work.
Shift it under the light of an overcast sun. You want to drop it in the sand, but you won’t. You wonder what it would feel like to rub wet grains into thin film. You wonder what it would be like to do that in the rain.
You are holding three photographs in your hands because they
don’t fit in your pockets. You stole them, but you don’t feel guilty. No one will miss them.
The last thing you do before you leave is pull a shingle off the
side of the house. Red. Bury it. Choose a spot in the swash, where the lake cannot stand still. The sand will get under your fingernails. You will try to stay standing until you won’t. You fall to your knees as the lake rushes in.
Sanna Wani
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the idem Subdued in the lamplight of the old bakery, I ate pasteis de
nata when my hands were free, and Julinha counted money in the back room of the parlour. I started back on the CHAMPION INDUSTRY HIGH-VOLUME WASH GRADE PRODUCT FOR INDUSTRIAL USE, white lanyard laced around my hip, timing softly with the wail of the engine and half-hours like excess on the floor. I was only a few weeks in at Estado d’Ovo. I knew full well but not much else about Julinha. Estado did
marito-political nights for 800 when she was young, by mornings she poured coffee for the lower vaults of west Toronto’s working-class. Where the mile around her was once discriminately Portuguese, student housing projects took molar blocks and coerced neat sections of denim wholesale, legal prescription and cocktail stalls—escapees turned renters. By the time I was hired it started to resemble the humid lounge of a small but thriving society.
“Columbus,” Lourenco said, stepping in from a rubber stair-
well. He was married to Clara, Julinha’s older sister, and manned the cold lunch from 11:00 to 3:00 while Clara looked after the pantry-stock and pastry. She wasn’t far behind hustling black olives.
“No, Robin,” she said, “like I call him the other day.”
“To me, it is good already.”
I tried to take my mind off a working girl named Rosewater,
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who wasn’t in the kitchen, but when the room was loud I hummed her name and let the air under my nose walk.
“Row, row, row… Row, behind her, rowing slow, in the rosy
kind of rosy wa-ter…”
It’s kind of an unseemly way to think these days but it felt
good as a pastime, and though I did notice she was late, I was doing my part—growing an appetite with Clara and Lourenco.
“Ah—what do you know?” Lourenco said as he plunged down a
box of green bananas, “You brought me wrong ones.”
“How wrong,” I said.
“These bananas, they are not handsome.”
I looked at him, he straightened and smirked, and I remem-
bered that we had an exchange some weeks ago where he’d been specific about the product being handsome “if it could.”
“Give them a few,” I said.
“Some skins like these,” Clara said, “don’t ripe if they don’t
want.”
I offered to help unpack some boxes coming off the truck on
the sidewalk and I collapsed them, and I put them into a plastic bag and took the bag outside to the recycling bin on the other side of the sidewalk, across from where I met the truck and threw them away. Out in the seating and booths were mostly students on their computers and notes. Rosewater still hadn’t arrived and that was odder than anything.
“I’ll nod at her first when she does, smile, and tell her we
should help each other in the pantry, and kiss her when we got there. It
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will be straightforward and simple,” I thought.
All I could hear were people talking. Two girls, a tall and a
short one, came up to the register, scouring the rows of the display case.
“What do you crave?” the tall one asked.
“Salt.”
“Then lick the sidewalk.”
“I crave some bread, and salt and some butter.”
“I’ve wanted citrus all day today.”
“That feels uninspired.”
I made back to the kitchen to touch some food and plates. On
the right-hand face of the CHAMPION INDUSTRY HIGH-VOLUME WASH GRADE PRODUCT FOR INDUSTRIAL USE, a clipboard hung downward with a gridded time-series paper gauging temperatures per hour, per day, and the white boxes of the grid were initialed in Julinha’s hand.
Association for Machination in Industry Practices Board of Directors Authorized Consent of Product Form and Certificate for Type #: LMR1248A at “ESTADO D’OVO” Temp of Product by Decided Interval Signatory Form by Managing Body or Consented Individual Body for Maintenance and Disclosure of Temps in Product Body 8.00: 20 degrees Celsius J.S. 9.00: 60 degrees Celsius J.S. 13.30: 100 degrees Celsius J.S.
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16.00: 50 degrees Celsius
Something I remembered about Rosewater is that she crosses
close in front of cars. I wonder if she ever got selective. What’s your make, Ro? What’s your model? What’s the finest year we had on the continent? Why are you such a Linus’s sister?
“Christopher.”
My heart forced loose and she was right behind me. We were so
post-Genesis in our white aprons and nitrile gloves.
“Where have you been?” I asked. She never looked so clean and
dangerous.
“I do nights now.”
I had some sense to know she wasn’t acting right, and I was
out to avoid it. Our first kiss took plenty of spars and hours.
“I’m only here fifteen more minutes,” I said.
“How was it this morning?”
“The fruit I pick isn’t handsome, and it gets me to thinking
I’m not very handsome. It was slow without you.”
I came closer and remembered my song for her. We were out of
the boats and I swam behind her in the rosy-ocean and she was as good as fish to me.
“You didn’t talk to Julinha?” she asked.
“For a little while this morning.”
“What did she say?”
“Some motivational, promotional, observation thing. I hate
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her voice.”
I ran a knuckle through my eyebrow, and I wanted to say
something about her skull-tight bun or her buck teeth because Rosewater had some really bad ones.
“You look angry, Christopher.”
I’m not really the sort of person who gets angry because I
only work at Estado and go home. There’s no middle ground for life like that.
“I’ve been breathing steam all day,” I said.
“Julinha said you were angry this morning.”
I looked back at the temperature gauges. The engine sounded
like a heaving motherless child, pressure dials twitching back and forth, and back and forth, like wrists on a good conductor.
“It was nothing,” I said, inching closer to her. “Let me see the
tusks, Rosy.”
I moved in to touch her cheek and she flinched against my
fingers, retreating two steps.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked down and seemed like she didn’t want to breathe,
and I waited for her to say something. It must take a jaw and a half for her.
“Do you remember the day you kissed me?” she asked.
“Yes, of course I do.”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember not knowing my place with you for so long. I
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remember the moment I closed my eyes.”
Rosewater smiled and kneaded her palms against each other as
she stepped back into my reach.
“Do you know what I remember?” she asked.
I sloped my neck down to meet her gaze.
“Tell me what you remember, darling.”
She peered into me with the stoned virtue of a housecat.
“I remember your grip.”
Lucas Ratigan
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Sayaka Daly
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