Goose Fiction, Volume 13 (2023-2024)

an annual review of short fiction

Volume 13

Spring 2024

Produced at Victoria College in the University of Toronto

Masthead

CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Sabina García Ortega & Simona Zaunius

HEAD ILLUSTRATOR

Elaine Xiao

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Tamara Doiny

Kenzie Johnston

Mackenzie Melichar

Daniyah Pervaiz

Devarya Singhania

Kiri Stockwood

Simona Zaunius

ILLUSTRATORS

Athen Go

Kasia Kaczmarek

Biew Biew Sakulwannadee

Elaine Xiao

LAYOUT EDITORS

Charlyn Ann Lapak

Brisa Liu

Layout supervised by Sabina García Ortega

Cover art by Elaine Xiao

Editors' Note

We are thrilled to present the Spring 2024 issue of Goose Fiction!

This accomplishment wouldn’t have been possible without our incredible team of individuals—both returning familiar faces and remarkable new additions—who collaborated tirelessly for this year’s journal. We extend our heartfelt appreciation to every member of our team. To our exceptional associate editors—Tamara, Kenzie, Mackenzie, Daniyah, Devarya, Kiri, and Simona—your dedication and passion for storytelling are integral to bringing Goose to life. To our talented head illustrator, Elaine; your breathtaking art will forever frame and define this journal. To our lovely illustrators–Athen, Kasia, Biew Biew, Elaine—your artwork enriches the journal, and we’re immensely proud to include your unique interpretations, extensions of the featured stories. Lastly, to our layout editors, Charlyn and Brisa; we acknowledge the particular challenges of this project and appreciate your enthusiasm to overcome them and bring us all together in this final product.

We extend our thanks to this year’s authors, who shared with us a glimpse into their creations—your trust in us makes this journal possible, and we are continuously amazed by the imaginative worlds you craft. Finally, we express profound gratitude to our readers. We hope you enjoy reading the journal as much as all the team and authors did crafting it. Your minds bring these stories once more into the present.

Within many of the stories that follow, you’ll find a variation of the phrase: “This is a story;” a meditation, an assertion, a mantra. We live in an age of performance–perfectly edited Instagram photos, hurried tweets with a corresponding GIF, Tik Tok “Storytimes” narrated by an AI voice. There’s something grounding about the short story, something authentic, that retains its significance.

If we were to share our own story, we describe this past year as a funny anecdote where two brand-new editor-in-chiefs undertake the daunting task of assembling a journal, unaware of the difficulties to come. It could make a good story, we think—a mostly humorous, sometimes frustrating, chaotic one. But that’s for another time. For now, we leave you with a fun fact: In the early 1900s, the Canadian Goose faced rapid population decline, but thanks to conservation efforts and regulations, their numbers now soar in the millions.

May short fiction continue to persevere and thrive as the Goose did.

Sabina García Ortega & Simona Zaunius Co-Editors-in-Chief, 2023-2024

Table of Contents

Newspaper Kites

Skin Analgesic

Here in the Castle

Roommates

fever dreaming

Dinner for Two

Out of Limbo

Anecdotes From a Brother to a Swan

About the Authors

Selena Mercuri

Lily Mengual

Victoria Bortolussi

Roza Sapir

Johanna Kiik

Shirley Yue Chen

Stella Dos Santos Nghi Nguyen Elisa

SELENA MERCURI

CW: Animal death PRINT EXCLUSIVE Newspaper Kites

KASIA KACZMAREK

Skin

LILY MENGUAL

CW: Intimate partner violence, blood, body horror

He sits down facing me, right on the edge of the bed, which sinks to meet his weight. One swift movement, and he’s leaning back onto his pillow. Legs crossed. There’s blood running down his chin, a small gash on the base of his cheek. “I cut myself shaving,” he says, raising a finger to his face and touching the weeping wound.

It is not altogether too strange to see him with one side of his face bare and the other still covered in stubble. He often cuts himself shaving, after all.

“Are you okay?”

He doesn’t respond for a moment, just stares at me with burrowing eyes. I stand up and move towards him, reaching out my hands and grasping his face. “Move your finger; I can’t see.”

His finger drags across his face, leaving a thin strand of cerise plastered across his neck, and revealing the small nick beneath. The blood is already drying, forming a flaking crust over the gash. “You’ll be alright,” I promise, leaning back. “You don’t need—”

“It hurts.” He eyes me. “You know what that means.”

I stiffen, then slowly extend my arm and offer him my hand. I’ve never pushed the envelope here but I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t offer he would just do it anyway. If that’s the case, then I would rather not know. It would sour us, I think.

He takes my palm in his, fingers drumming up my arm as he lowers a nail until it makes contact with my flesh and digs deeper, hooking into me. A moment’s flash of pain stammers through me, then dulls. His nail catches the first layer of my skin and he flicks the finger upward, taking a few centimetres

of me up with it. My skin loops around his thumb, and he uses his other hand to lift it to his cut.

He presses the strip of my skin against his. My own cut aches, but no blood spurts from the wound. He presses the pad of his index finger against his cheek until my skin clings to his face, and when he swings his arm back down the grafting is already complete and the wound is entirely gone Invisible. “Thank you,” he whispers.

“Always.”

His hand palms the back of my neck. I slump against him, exhausted, but he moves away, leaving me on the bed, and walks back into the bathroom. I hear the strum of the razor begin again and imagine him sliding it against the right side of his face.

The world is vibrating slightly at the corners of my vision. It always happens after this. My body is riddled with holes and bruises, small gashes of my own where my skin has been stripped from me. Never enough to bleed, not after the first few times. The bumps remain; they won’t ever fill back in, I think. At the very least, that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve always prayed that, despite everything, I’m different, and they will.

The water is running in the bathroom, and my head is spinning. I crawl further up the bed, push the pillow into my face, and wait for the buzzing in my ears to subside; next: hot flashes, then the inevitable calm.

He turns off the faucet. The bathroom door opens again, and I hear footsteps on the carpeted floor and the sigh that he exhales, which lingers, emanates from his mouth and diffuses into the air of the room; in my ears, in my hair, down the length of my body. I pull my arms and legs tighter into me, keeping my head buried deep into the pillow. Waiting for him to skim his hand across my hair, to pull me into him, kiss me better, thank me for the draining of my life force in exchange for the strengthening of his.

There is no touch, no other sound permeating us but the remains of his sigh. More footsteps, then another door—the bedroom door this time. I know because it squeaks when it’s opened.

The prisoner in the cell does not stop banging his chains against the wall, in the desperate hope that the links will unclasp. Sisyphus does not stop pushing the boulder up the hill. Like him, I think that one day my offerings

ELAINE XIAO

and sufferings will be enough, and I will be relieved of my punishment. At least Sisyphus is well versed in his mistake and consequence, and knows what went wrong. I remain in the dark, tethered to my man like the bird to the tree, the bee to the flower.

I remain on the bed for three hours before he returns. Starts me up again; reboots me.

A kiss on the temple. A date: dinner and a movie. He tells me he loves me, pulls his arm through mine. Winds me up and lets me sit, laugh, soak up his presence as a sponge does water.

We’re back home holding one another in the same bed that he showed me his shaving cut in. He points to his leg. A piece of my skin is peeling off of it; we didn’t graft it properly the week before. He used to say sorry, when we first sliced me to fix him. Now, he just reaches for me like it’s a given.

We take some skin from the same spot but on my other arm this time, to keep me symmetrical. We would use my back, usually, but it’s depleted now, hollowed in. At night sometimes I wake up and it oozes blood through the single layer left. I never tell him how he’s taken too much from me. Often he still reaches there first when he needs me, but I’ve taken to directing him away; I don’t let him look at me there. The skin is yellowing, decaying, translucent until you can see the inside of me and my rust.

He is half of myself, after all; not simply in the way that Emily Brontë said it but in the literal sense as well. My skin holds him together, like his kisses sustain me. We cannot be one without the other. Yet his constant use of me will kill me. My deterioration is already beginning. I am losing my sight, my speed, my stamina. Soon I will become hunch-backed too, and that will stretch my fragile back skin so much it will split. I’ve heard these stories before, of the doll that was bent too much, broken. Often, in the stories, they snap back.

But my story is different. I am not in love.

Analgesic VICTORIA BORTOLUSSI

CW: Self-harm, substance abuse

my mom and i split a bottle of wine tonight. we retreat to different rooms. i smudged an expensive lipstick on with my finger just to get in the bath and write this. i light a candle in mourning—it has three wicks, contains multitudes, i’m trying to think of something meaningful and deep to say about that. i fear nothingness has overcome me. the match burned my thumbnail, but i know better than to expect perfection with fire. he asked me to make a playlist for him, so i’ll spend the next hour and a half curating and collaging together ten pretentious songs because i know he only wants to fuck the girl i show him, not the one that sliced an ‘x’ into the inside of her ankle thirty minutes ago. sometimes i think about what it would be like to be honest, but that little girl was put to rest long ago. i can’t decide whether to read or to rot; it seems i will never catch up to who i thought i once was. i still haven’t figured out how to paint my nails without having to scrape the polish off my skin in a scalding shower afterwards (i’ll be twenty soon). something yells at me that antipsychotics only work when taken in large doses. i take them one at a time, savouring, the kind of thing i only let myself indulge in every once in a while. when the bottle is empty and the final number is a multiple of eleven, i take it as a good omen. i welcome the migraine and the shakiness of my extremities and the tilt of the room. a year ago, i couldn’t think of virginia woolf without crying, i romanticised signing my suicide note with the simplicity of the letter ‘v’ in the way she once did. but i’ve never written anything worth remembering, so i ride the bus to the hospital instead. i am obsessed with getting drunk alone in a half-lit room, in a way that is so gentle and sweet you are mourning it before it has ended. that

is the only thing that makes me think of girlhood and it is the only thing that allows me to forget about my own.

ELAINE XIAO

Here in the Castle

ROZA SAPIR

I told him no way she’s a princess; look at her, standing pathetic in the frame of our castle door, soaked to the bone with filthy rainwater and smelling like a barn. But he said that I told him the first mark of a true princess is her voice, and he told me that her voice sounded like an angel’s song when she showed upt at our door and said, “Excuse me, I’m cold and tired and come from very far, may I sleep here in your castle just one night, please?” Well as Queen I know an angel would never say that, nevermind a CW: Harm, disturbing content

It was only a pea and that’s what I told her. Look, there are soft white dove-feather mattresses climbing all the way up to Heaven. One pea and that’s it; that’s all you have to endure to get to Heaven. One pea to endure and from then on you are in the clouds hearing the angels sing, and you’ll be a princess. It’s good that you thrash. It’s good that you scream when you feel the pea’s rough edges stabbing your back from all the way down below. It’s good that your knuckles turn white with tension and your teeth grind each other black. It’s good that you dream of being a sphere among identical spheres, cramped together in a green coffin, and you wake up dizzy and panting. It means you’re still as of yet untouched. You know, there are women who don’t even feel the pea. They don’t even know it’s there. All they feel are the soft, white, dove-feather mattresses, piled on top of one another like a ladder of clouds, and those women are fools. It’s just one night; just one night and we’ll get rid of the pea. After this night, provided tonight you kick and scream and thrash just enough, on account of that pea, just that one pea, you can sleep all your nights forever more by the side of my son, the prince, ruling over Heaven and the whole sky.

princess, and she’d never be such a pathetic creature, looking for all the world like a cowering rabbit staring down the barrel of a hunter’s gun with such wide eyes full of pain. I mean, what could she even be scared of? Here in the castle it is warm. We have fresh hot meals everyday; roasted mutton with the blood still flowing, braised duck whose feathers teasingly tickle the roof of your mouth, broth coaxed from a cow’s bones. Here in the castle our ceilings stretch so far upward they disturb God in His sleep. Here in the castle, here in our castle, there is the whole world. It never rains here in our castle. The clouds here are on our ceiling, and all they do is make the eternal sunshine not quite so harsh.

But again, maybe she didn’t know because she came from far away. And that’s why I told him: Son, you must travel from here out to other castles, and find yourself a princess to be your wife. It’s important you find her yourself, living in her unspoiled natural state, until of course you pluck her gently like a flower and plant her here anew, where you and she can have as your dominion the entirety of Heaven and all that lies above and beneath. This flower at our castle door could have seeds all over the world; look at her, bone-drenched in the clouds’ entire supply of rainwater, so full of life she could have burst. But I ought to believe what he told me about the sound of her voice so I let him let the girl come inside. After all, my son had gone to all the other castles and seen all the other girls and none of their voices were quite right—or so he said. One girl squawked like a toad; another neighed like a horse. So here there was a girl with an angel’s voice, and we let her in our castle and closed the door behind her.

But damn her voice—I am the Queen and as God as my witness I will not let her stay in my castle. May the Lord forgive me; I didn’t have a choice. I had no choice but to do what I did, to tell my son to do what he did. I told him, Son, look here, look at your hand, and he and I both saw the pea growing there. I motioned wordlessly to the ladder of mattresses, the canopy of clouds, our ceiling, God. I let my hand say what my words could not and I knew that he as my son, the prince, would understand and do what I needed. It was only a pea and that’s what I told her—silently, when she had gone inside, when all I saw was my shadow printed on the bedroom door.

Let God tell it: there she was that next morning in our kitchen, and she looked for all the world just like a princess. Drooping, narrow eyes, pulled

down and down by heavy dark bags. The whites of her eyes were red and her pupils had swallowed her irises. I asked about how she slept last night knowing what she would answer, and she spoke as though she had my tongue. She began with caution, not like a prey animal slinking away from its killer but a hunter approaching its game: “I don’t wish to appear ungrateful for what the prince has given me, of course. But allow me to say that, for all I loved the thousand white, dove-feather mattresses he arranged for me... peculiarly, I could hardly sleep all night, due to what appeared to be a sharp needle somewhere deep beneath, stabbing my back all night long.” That’s what she said and the prince, in the shadowy part of the castle where neither of us could see him, heard and that was that.

Well, there’s nothing I could’ve said to stop it. So it was that the prince married the princess, and I stood like a statue as it all happened in this castle, and watched without seeing how together they ascended upward up to the ceiling, the sunlit sky, on a ladder of white dove-feather mattresses. Down here where I stay in the castle it’s dark, wet, and cold. Why it’s wet I’m not sure, though I think it might be on account of me. I think I might be leaking, raining my own private rain. But again I don’t know because the darkness obscures me from myself. But I know that it’s cold for sure and that tells me that I’m in the part of the castle where the sun does not shine. Then I hear that awful dripping sound constantly, coming from nowhere—or, again, maybe from me. So I think she must have followed that dripping sound to go downward on that day when she visited me. The door opened and she appeared above me in a frame of rectangular sunlight, shining around but not on her, and certainly not on me. I think she hesitated before going down further, maybe because she expected me to say something to let her in. I said nothing because I did not know the words. So the light behind her back gave her the burden of speech, and finally the princess told me that it’s been years since the first night in her castle and she still cannot sleep. She asked me if I knew what to do, how to bear it all. In the dark I realised her voice was like an angel’s indeed.

“Excuse me, I’m cold and tired and come from very far, may I sleep here in your castle for just one night, please?” I told him. I told him I’d been travelling so long in the dark, the cold, under a low ceiling of engorged clouds ejaculating sheets and sheets of water. So long have I been searching

BIEW

BIEW

SAKULWANNADEE

for a castle, and here, miraculously, I was. He told me I was a princess with an angel’s voice, and those words are what kept me here in the castle. For without them surely I could never have borne it: the pea, the wretched pea. I tried banging on God’s door but he didn’t open it, didn’t help. Perhaps he was asleep. At any rate it was apparent that the ceiling was the highest I could go. So I let the night pass me by in the darkness of my closed lids. And then in my dream I was a sphere encased in a green coffin, dark like the underbelly of a storm cloud, and lying next to me in that coffin there were a million other spheres, in every direction, out toward infinity. The next morning there was a searing pain in my lower back and a dent there like someone had punched me. Yet I remembered my angel’s voice, the voice the prince said I had, and figured surely this must then be an angel’s pain. Truly I don’t know why I did it, why I told her. But that morning I told her, the Queen, about my sleepless night, thinking what I don’t know, not sure what she could say in response but wanting to hear it anyway. But in a castle this bright no secrets can hide—so the words meant for the Queen travelled to the prince’s ears; he heard me—and he told me that what was beneath all those mattresses was merely a pea. I, delicate flower that I was, carried to him by the winds from far away, was so pure that even a pea, buried underneath a thousand mattresses, could disturb my slumber, making me a princess true. So it was that from then on I slept in Heaven forevermore.

I, too, remember that, even after the prince told me he’d gotten rid of the pea, our nights were painful and sleepless, if only just for me. Perhaps it was just the memory of it torturing me; you know how memories have a way of hurting even when stashed deep down below where you can’t see them, much like peas. But I know that I matured into a queen once it no longer hurt to sleep up there, when I realised that this castle here is paradise, and the only price to pay to enter paradise is just enduring one tiny little pea. For all it is, is just a pea. It was just one pea, one pea in the midst of infinity that we can all own here forever in our castle. One pea is so small compared to everything we have here in our hands. I tell her now look at your hands. Put your hands up to the light and stretch your fingers. All that’s illuminated for you in the spaces between your fingers is yours. And how much you have. Would you let your world go, would you leave this castle, just because of a pea? All it is just one pea. It was only a pea and that’s what I told her.

Roommates

JOHANNA KIIK

Our house was real. It had green wooden doors, with paint chips around the edges, tall windows that let in light from the east when the sun awoke, and a few cacti that sat sedentary on the kitchen windowsill. Our house was real, and the floors creaked when we stepped in for the first viewing.

The Bedroom

Before we’d bought bed frames, there were two twin mattresses on the hardwood floor. That first night was frigid. The thin sheets I found at Walmart made my toes and fingers feel like glass, and you kept trying to convince me to come over and join you. Huddle for warmth, you whispered, like the penguins. Your voice was interspersed with hushed giggles. I’m not quite sure why we were whispering. We owned the house; perhaps it didn’t feel right to speak, not when there were so many still, empty rooms surrounding us.

You were a tempting seductress. Our friends would call you that, and you’d keel over laughing every time, protesting that you were not some winking, sultry woman. There was an elusive charm that hung around you in the air. You were all beams and softness and shoulder taps and everything was a little too close for me to feel stable. That first week, sleeping in the same room on our parallel mattresses, my body was electric. Charged and terrified. I would moderate my facial expressions, my eyes, my mouth, my eyebrows, my smiles, all in quiet check. I don’t think I realised that in the darkness, we could never see one another’s features.

The Dining Room

My mother once told me that food is not for eating, but for community. Our steady spruce table was not long, but it was a rectangle that lodged itself well into the small room. You were up at six in the morning, and you cooked sunny-side down eggs with runny yolks in the centre. It was about six forty-five when you sauntered into our bedroom, chunky woollen socks sliding along the wood. You were humming, words bleeding into one another at times; morning, and sunshine, and trees. Some kindergarten melody. You touched my shoulder, gently. I flinched. Backing up in giggling surrender, you waved your hands like a white flag. Sorry, you chuckled, I know it's early. I was breathing unevenly, heavily.

By the time I had left the room, you were seated, hair up in some intricate clip. I took the opposite end of the table. There we were, like vampires eating as far from one another as they could. It must have been a funny sight—I shovelled eggs into my mouth, and would glance up at you when you were distracted. And once, when I believed it safe, I peeked through my eyelashes and your dark eyes were gazing back, curiously. Your nose scrunched, and you continued eating. I wanted to reach out, to trace the bridge of your nose and the outline of your profile, trace your jaw and throat and the curve of your lips. Of course I wanted. I wanted, singularly.

The Bathroom

I remember hearing a story about a man who deeply loved his own face. He would stare at his nose, his hair, his pink cheeks, his smattered freckles, his pleasant eyebrows—there was really no end of things to absorb. He was not horrid to others, not necessarily, but he simply could not stop gazing at his wavering reflection in the empty stream. His town considered him obsessive, but perhaps he was something else. Perhaps there really was something to his features. I’m sorry, I don’t quite recall the ending of the story.

We installed mirrors on every wall in the bathroom. I thought it would be useful to have extra space, with the two of us sharing a bathroom. My gadgets, electric toothbrush, and hair iron and hairspray and mousse and moisturiser and cleanser and sunscreen, took up quite some room, and I always needed a mirror to apply everything. You said it felt like an elevator when you stepped into the bathroom. When you looked at the mirror behind you, it went on infinitely. Smaller and smaller yous, dimmer and dimmer as

they reflected back.

We almost didn’t buy the house because of the single bathroom. Or, more specifically, I almost didn’t buy the house because of the single bathroom.

Two days after moving in, you hung up your clothes on the back of the door and padded into the shower. It had fogged glass, textured with ribbing that made only your bare outline visible. You yelled for me while I was humming to myself, placing small pots onto the windowsill in the kitchen.

Could you grab me the soap?

I stopped in front of the bathroom door. It seemed seven feet tall. Knocking hesitantly first, I softly entered and let the misty steam brush my skin. The shower glass was steamed, too, and it made you look like a distant shape. The heavy air made my head spin, heady and too close in proximity to you. The soap we had bought was lavender. When I took it to my face, the scent coated my senses. The shower door opened with a click, and you delicately revealed your hand, opening your palm to the ceiling. It was a magician's hand, slender with elegant long fingers. I placed the soap bar gingerly in your hand, and my fingers buzzed when they touched yours, exfoliated and damp with the condensation hanging in the air. I pulled my hand back rapidly. It was too much for me—your quiet vulnerability and my weighted clothes watching me in every mirror. It is much too much for me. I brought my fingers to my nose in the kitchen, and they smelled like your skin.

The Kitchen

In the kitchen, there were spoons. Of course not just one type of spoon— there were teaspoons, and tablespoons, and silver spoons, and serving spoons, and even a spoon with holes like it had been poked through with a pencil. We went to the local thrift store, and you called the engraved metal spoons wicked. Your passion made me giggle, so that day you kept calling everything in the store by that same descriptor. Wicked plates. Wicked mugs. Wicked aprons.

Dinner was our least formal meal. We stood at the counter most nights, hunched over our steaming plates. I could cook dinner quite well; this is what you told me that same evening, when I made a stir fry with chicken breast and fresh asparagus. I can’t take compliments. You knew this, so you said it again, that I could cook well. I smiled. Brushed it off. You brushed my arm,

right where there was a birthmark. I looked down at the birthmark. Your fingers lingered against my skin, slowly moving down the curve of my arm. I looked up. Your voice softened, and you uttered a serious thank you, eyes flickering back and forth between mine, searching. I nearly choked, coughed, and stepped back from your hand, where it still hung in the empty air. Your eyes were still searching my face, and when I turned around, you dropped your hand. I walked to the garbage and scraped the sauce off my plate, then peeked over at you. You were silent, watching the road out our window. I saw car headlights reflect across your iris, and I put my plate in the sink.

The Backyard

I heard a story once, about a man who’d killed Satan. He made it all the way—he defeated a curse, he became a king, he constructed buildings and forts throughout his country, he saved maidens. He was celebrated as a legend. Feasts and parties at his whim and calloused fingertips. Still, as time trudged onwards, they didn’t look at him the same. With so many murders in one’s past, I suppose, people become disillusioned. His brother, faithful as ever to his country, grew closer with the people. At least he was less of an objective idea and more of a person in their eyes. He hadn’t killed Satan, but he had surely spoken with the farmers, kissed a few children, shook hands heartily with businessmen. So, the man, killer of Satan, watched. He was not jealous. He’d lost that ability after so many years. He awaited his moment, and at the right time quietly resigned his kingdomship, passed it to his brother. The forest would creak often enough to distract him, so he retreated, a hunched mass of body. There’s more to the story somewhere, somewhere from somebody in my household. I can’t seem to remember it now. I'd like to think he found some wood sorrel, sweetheart leaves with sour tang. But I can't say. This story is not about backyards.

The Living Room

Your small group of friends, Mary and Trina and Marcus and James and Gloria, all sat around our low oak table with tall glasses of dark wine. We had couches, but everybody was uncoiled that night, their socked toes curled on our carpet. After a few drinks, Mary always became a bit rowdy. Her limbs brushed your arm when she laughed. She picked up the empty bottle, a few drops of liquid rolling around in it, and plunked it onto the table satisfyingly.

I was not naive; I knew how this game worked. She spun the bottle, and it turned around and around and around and around. Bile burned the back of my throat. I stood up abruptly, backing into the dim-lit corner of the room. Your head turned, and I could feel your eyes glance over at me. I like to think you were concerned, but after a split second, you turned your back to me. Sweat glistened on the back of your neck.

You kissed a few people that night. The air around me was stagnant, and each breath you let out filled it with more of that stale sweet smell. I took breaths in from my open mouth, though each made my stomach swell with nausea. You seemed affectionate, solid, gentle, kind. I hoped you didn’t feel my eyes lingering.

It was not right for me to be angry. I was not a scorned lover, I was not a veteran coming to an empty home, I was not Ares. It was most certainly wrong for my anger to hum like a dissonant chord, especially when I had flinched at the touch of your hand and pulled away from the brush of your fingers and would most definitely recoil if your lips touched mine. I was in a foreigner's body, I suppose. This foreign being was overwhelmingly bitter. It watched your soft lips, of course, and your hands, spindly fingers brushing other’s jawlines, curling up into hair, and your eyes, how they’d close and your eyelashes would brush your cheeks and how you seemed to smile with every lean in, and your neck, how it would crane to reach other people for touch. How funny I didn’t notice these things before.

After an hour of this, then another hour of chatting, everybody was tired out, loopy, giggling but sagging to the floor. You were almost asleep. Whenever it came to be this late, your eyes would half-close as you spoke, like the charming young flirts in old films. The close group of you fell asleep on the fuzzy carpet.

I watched for a bit, in the dim corner. I was not so angry anymore, and I'd sunken to sit on the creaky hardwood floor after awhile. My arms were heavy, like they were being pulled to the earth. You looked warm across the room, eyes closed and hushedly breathing with you cheeks flushed a blotchy pink. My back was cold against the wall behind me, and my head felt as though it was spinning and drifting—a lone tumbleweed across a dark plain, or perhaps a satellite high in the atmosphere. It was somewhere I was not. I hollowed out. The rest of the rooms in our house were silent. I

stood up quietly and padded around them all, turning on the lights to stare at our carefully placed furniture, our elaborate decor and our large windows, open to pure darkness. Turned the lights back off. I was quite alone, and I thought to myself, This is it. This is what it will be. Tomorrow you will wake me up, make me eggs, let me make dinner, talk with me until my body is sore, and we will fall back asleep. Sometimes, I think that your fingers would pass right through me if you really tried, right through my skin and through my stomach and through my contracting muscles, through my liver and through my stuttering heart most certainly. You'd pass through me, right to me other side, and neither you nor I would feel a thing.

Our house is very real. It sits on a residential street, with a corner store two blocks away. It has a driveway that leads to our green wooden doors, windows that open to let in the evening breeze, and two twin sized bed frames that sit silently in two separate rooms.

fever dreaming

SHIRLEY YUE CHEN

CW: Subtance use

We met at the bedside of a mutual dying friend—a half-mad woman abandoned by her third husband. Her name was Siberia and she was an artist. We all were.

I was a mildly unsuccessful poet who fed off of my upper-middle-class acquaintances. I never went to my friends because I knew I would lose them if I did. So I went through my contacts, from B to X, back through the years. Here and there. Downtown. North Van. Salt Spring Island. Along the way, I documented the disintegration of my acquaintanceships as my next project.

Sadly, by the summer of ‘29, I was running out of acquaintances. For a while, I hung out on Hasting Street, where I lost nearly a quarter of my body weight and one of my kidneys. Being under anaesthesia, I wasn’t sure which kidney got taken out, the left or the right. I assumed the extraterrestrials took the left because ever since the operation, I had an inclination to lean to my left. But it also might be the case that my heart has grown heavier. That’s another story.

Anyways, on a lukewarm summer eve—the eve of the Depression—I was forced to Siberia and her Kelowna motel doorstep. There, I discovered that she was dying from something trivial.

Someone with half a beard opened the door. He said that he’s Siberia’s caretaker and his name’s Leon with an e. I sensed that he wasn’t born with this name. I also gave him my made-up name.

He showed me to her bed. She lay still on plaid sheets, hair fanned out around her pale face like a pool of dried blood. She looked quite dead, but Leone assured me that she was only dying. She was an actress, a very good

one, so I had doubts.

I crouched down to get a closer look, to see if her nose hair was twitching at all. In our shared Shakepeare’s tragicomedy class, the professor once said that dying and sleeping are indistinguishable on the stage. She was making an argument with that fact. I forgot where the argument led. I saw that her eyelids held blue lightning—the veins.

Siberia surged into life and violence and grabbed me and kissed me. Iron brands. Vices. Red hot delirium. Like she was assaulting death with tongue. The bitter-sour fire of vomit, aged, with a whiff of canned Filipino pineapples. Then she slapped me and cried “Иди на хуй Dylan!” then fell back into bed.

From Leone, I would later learn that Dylan was the third husband. Dylan was an avocado farmer, which was an unfortunate profession, being based in snow-plagued Prince Rupert. It was apparently performance art.

Leone did not do anything during the proceeding. He watched us, trying to find the best angle and composition. Then I gathered he was a painter and asshole of some sort.

Leone relayed to me Siberia’s symptoms. Notably, she would grab whoever’s near and pretend they were whoever she wanted them to be. She would spat into their faces and/or kiss them. This tactic had been effective in getting others to give her space. I ought to try it someday.

Then I remembered that Siberia’s vague letters talked about her living in an orchard of fever dreams. Yours, from Prince Rupert. The ocean eventually came to her door and she had to move away. When we still saw and touched each other, she told me that my forehead was always hot. Always fever dreaming. I told her that she just had critically cold hands.

Leone saw her outbursts as metaphoric of something grand, yet to be named. I thought it was her attempt at closure.

“You are lucky. You’ll probably never get that experience again.” Leone said. “She rarely does that now, dying and all.”

“Can you get any experience again?”

“Hm.”

Leone then went to scrape the sweat off of Siberia’s face with a soft little knife he had especially made for this purpose. He was supposed to be the working professional here, so I just stood and watched and thought about

how every experience is once in a lifetime. Even for a Buddhist. Quick, write that down!

Leone sat cross-legged by the bed and began to paint. Her sweat and tears were the water to his watercolours, waking up the chunks of dead paint on his palette. He said that his brushes were made from the hair of past loves. His brushes came in blond and black and neon green. So he had met the extraterrestrials too. But I couldn’t talk to him about them because of the non-disclosure agreement.

As he painted, Leone asked what my art was. I said my art was living and starving. He said that was a noble pursuit. I nodded and smiled but secretly thought him stupid. The umber of his eyes would become my second favourite colour.

I told him that I knew Siberia from school back in Toronto, three or fifteen years ago. She went by Nadezhda then. We were in the arts and class together, along with her first husband. We were always the sober ones at writing club gatherings, dragging bodies into beds and swiffering puke off the floor (wine went down red and came up mauve—now that is my third favourite colour). I simply hated the burning taste. She was Russian with an alcohol allergy, born to be ironic.

I duelled with her first husband and won, but she chose him anyway.

I told him how we sat behind bookshelves, on the library’s warm oak floor and secretly devoured marmalade laid out on thick artisan bread. How there, she braided my hair while I flipped through pages, comprehending little but her ice-cold fingers. She would point at the passersby framed within window panes, and we would imagine their lives and plot twists.

The braids she gave me always fell loose. Her white turtlenecks would always get dirty from the floor, but she had an endless supply of them. She was rich and now she’s poor. How did that happen?

Leone did not know either. He always knew her as poor and could not imagine her rich. He knew her from the second husband, an actor-directorsinger-songwriter with a thousand names. None real.

Some said that she went through bills and husbands and aspirations too quickly. That’s why she was expiring early.

Did she start drinking? Or perhaps it was her uncanny obsession with canned fruits, especially the tropical variety, that broke her wallet and her.

Vitamin overdose?

We began to talk about other friends who died beside her bed.

Pills, car crashes, heart aches, and attacks were not creative enough. We talked about the head in the oven. The walk into the river with pockets full of colourful stones. The sesame allergy at an all-you-can-eat hot pot place.

Naturally, we grew a little depressed. We were still so young. Why we die? Youths and humans in general were prone to death. It’s not all our fault. No one is at fault. It just happened to be this way. It happened and is happening and will keep happening so let’s move on and on and make beautiful things out of shit.

Leone said that Siberia had insisted on painting a postcard. She said it’ll be good for the holidays. She’ll send them to the real Siberia where she buried her first husband. She said cut the postcard into three uneven pieces and how he was cut. The second piece, the middle piece, should be the largest.

She said that in July. A few weeks ago.

That postcard was what Leon was painting now. He had failed to produce any work of satisfaction before, but kept trying.

I watched Leone paint for a few hours while holding Siberia’s cold left hand. She suddenly tore her hand from mine and attempted to raise it up.

“Melanie! Melanie!” She cried and then her hand dropped and she died.

We did not know any Melanie. Did she know any Melanie? I wondered if we knew her at all. She threw us off our interpretation of her in her last performance and I was mad.

According to Leone, in her last bout of insanity, she claimed she will give herself to the church. She did not specify which church and so we assumed that it was the biggest one. We used the big yellow phonebook at the front desk to call up a priest.

The funeral was a week later.

She was perfectly centred in the coffin, framed in dark wood. I made a connection with the fuzzy shapes of strangers we knew so intimately, framed by ancient library windows. What a painting. Our eyes shut on their lives like coffins, seizing and immortalising the arbitrary. This is the only art we can engage in: set rain into stone, kill what’s meant to flow. The murder that is meaning-making.

The ground was steaming. Fresh dirt. Still grieving dirt.

Leone asked me to say something.

“She is...”

Note that I did not use “she was.” There’s no past tense in my mother tongue in the strict English sense. We say “I go yesterday” instead of “I went.” For kids these days, “I go” is also a swear word, short for “I go to your mother.” I often use this phenomenon to mould my grammatical mishaps into artistic licence.

“She is.” I said. “This is...”

I was choking. I wasn’t sure about any word or anyone or anything anymore.

This is. This just is.

As they were laying down the coffin, Leone kissed me. Father Martin cast us out of the graveyard, and heaven. It was raining and the kiss was tasteless. But the texture was interesting. His lips were very chapped. He needed Vaseline.

The postcard and the tombstone ended up blank. Negative space could be very powerful.

“I want to start something new.” Leone said. We held onto each other and cried a little.

For some anachronistic reason, Leone owned a Tesla, which we took to get out of town. Traffic sucked. That night, he got very drunk in Delta. From 10 to 11:30, he talked mainly about shampoo and how tears streaming down faces could facilitate healthy beard growth. He vowed to open a spa or become a chef. At around 1 am, he claimed to have fucked babies into men. With unsalted butter as lube. Or extra virgin olive oil. Love’s a culinary experience. Warming up cold dishes, cold bodies. You make love. You serve love, not vice versa. We, hungry. Always.

I grew alarmed. I told him had a flight to Chongqing in a few hours, because there would be another funeral to catch soon. My first love is from Chongqing and they cultivated a critically-endangered blue moss in their ears, for hot-pot purposes. I told him that and I believed it. Did he? I was somewhat drunk too, on what I did not know. I didn’t drink.

Anyway, we ended up in the half-gravel, half-weed parking lot. The sky was spitting rain on us. Cold air pressed into my skin like Siberia’s fingers. I felt very high and very low under the blue-white streetlight. I thought

of the extraterrestrials, who liked blinding beams of light and dancing the moonwalk. Everything was confusing. Haunting. Fever living and dreaming and dying.

Leone asked for consent and then took out a box-cutter from his pocket. He cut my hair and drove away. We never saw each other again. Until we saw each other again.

KASIA KACZMAREK

Dinner for Two

Yvette’s body is a prairie. Her stomach is a grass-rolling hill, dotted with gopher-dug moles and a hairtrail of wild barley. Her chest is the parched, dry patch of dirt she grew up watching from her window, where fluttering birds would take their dusty baths and talk nervously to each other. Peeking over the distant horizon are the two stoney, round mountains of her thighs, and when she closes her eyes she can still hear the cloud of mosquitoes that buzzed above her head all her childhood. When she looks down at herself, even in her city apartment so far from the flatlands, all Yvette sees is Saskatchewan.

At noon, she makes it home from a trek through that very city. The kitchen counter is covered in vegetables from the farmer’s market by the duck-pond park. This morning, by firm recommendation of her culinary instructor, she took the subway down to the stands in pursuit of the unique taste she could not, apparently, acquire at a grocery store. Yvette always takes him at his word—she hasn’t spent quite enough time in a white tunic to be able to taste which soybeans were harvested by corporate-owned tractors in British Columbia and which were pulled from the bush by calloused Quebecois fingers. For now, she just wakes up early to hover by the stands pretending to know how to choose the best lemons. She tries not to baulk at all the new she is forced to encounter here. Before moving to the city she had never paid quite so much for collard greens, seen quite so many crowds, nor met quite so many people.

But, then again, she had never met quite such a good person as Julia.

Julia is all kinds of new. They like to wander around neighbourhoods Julia

knows while Yvette tells her about the house in Saskatchewan and Julia nods without knowing where that is. When they go bar-hopping, Julia tells her a story she’s collected for each place, usually about the friends she has or people she knows. Julia doesn’t understand why the only thing Yvette knows how to order is her father’s favourite beer, and Yvette doesn’t tell her that before she came here, she could count on one hand the number of times she’d stepped foot into a restaurant. Yvette knows the city the way Julia knows the true plains, which is to say not really at all.

Julia has never tasted wild horsemint, the kind that springs up near the creek in the height of summer. She has never crushed her neighbour’s bergamot between her fingers and smelt that sharp freshness on her hands for the rest of the day. Julia has never, and will never, taste the brilliant things that cooked in Yvette’s father’s crockpot. Julia has never seen the blueness of a cloudless sky, the pinkness of a wildflower, the yellowness of a blundering bee—not like Yvette has seen them.

Yvette has never seen the inside of Julia’s room. She has never seen the magnets on Julia’s fridge or where she hangs her keys or the clutter on her nightstand or her face without glasses. She wants to see all of those things. She wants to feel them, she wants them to be hers to think about. She wants to know what it’s like to have a story for each bar in the borough. To know so many names it’s hard to keep track. It was why she braved the farmer’s market, in the hopes that the freshly-picked onions would taste enough like the wild Saskatchewan onions that grow in the meadow.

The pan is set on the stove and the heat is turned on. She picks up the slab of beef from the butcher with both hands and places it on the cutting board. The piece is coated in a layer of rich white fat, mottled with patches of blue where the flesh peeks through. She would not dare massacre it by trimming the fat in the name of presentability, not when leaving only the marbled flesh would deprive the beef of a good soaking in oil over heat. Yvette always thought peasant dinners, like beef with the fat uncut, were leagues ahead of any dish made by anyone with money. Food has a different flavour when you cook it to survive. When you haven’t lost enough of your humility to forget you need everything you can get in order to live.

When the meat is cut into neat cubes, it goes into the hot and oiled pan. Yvette places her feet in their familiar places in front of the store and smiles

as sizzling fills the apartment. She grabs a handful of coarse salt and throws it across the beef. She grew up watching her father cook in sure-handed flicks and waves, pouring batter for pancakes onto high heat and flinging them all the way in the air with the edge of his pan. That feeling of seeing it land perfectly every time on the way down never left her. He cooked like he had never burnt a meal or over-salted, and he was lucky that he would never hear it from little Yvette if he did. She mixes the meat and watches it go from red to grey to brown in the heat.

Once brown, the chunks of meat go into the pot. The chopped vegetables don’t sizzle quite as loudly when they are put on the pan, but they do soak up the thick oil that the steak fat left behind. Yvette wishes she could borrow her father’s confident gestures of the hand when she cooks, but she does not want her cooking to be his. Good as it was, it never managed to convince anyone to visit again for more. The flatland was quiet, but it was also almost entirely void of neighbours to come knocking. The light from their windows carried for kilometres at night, and the grass was not tall enough to hide them from the road, but still there were only ever two people at the dining table. Her father’s meals were for her mouth only. She adds the vegetables and broth to the pot. As she turns the heat on the highest setting and waits for it to boil she thinks that maybe that’s what made the prairies so barren—he had raised her to love his favourite flavours and to make stew in his way, and that made her food unpalatable to anyone but the two of them.

Yvette throws herbs and spices into the pot—thyme, rosemary, ground black pepper. When she feels she’s finished she throws in a little more, just to quiet the fear that it might be one more pinch away from blandness. She watches the dry leaves get waterlogged and swallowed by the stew, and then she puts the lid on the pot and turns to ready the rest of the space.

She finds her round yellow tablecloth and throws it on her rickety table. It comes second-hand from home, but unlike the rest of her things, it has no stains or marks to marr the pattern. She gives it another look to be certain, but all she sees are the delicate little brown dandelions printed all over it, each one tiny and still so detailed. It was in the attic for special occasions, which meant it rarely, if ever, got used. She hopes eyes other than hers will notice the dandelions.

Yvette produces two plates from her favourite collection. They’re cream

in the middle and green around the rims, with twelve evenly spaced little bouquets of baby’s breath painted on with glaze. The flowers are just little clouds of white with dark stems, but they were drawn with a brush so thin Yvette hurts her eyes trying to see all the detail. The rims are streaked with dark patches where the glaze was first poured, and the bottom of the plate is marked with grooves where someone’s fingers had not-quite smoothed the clay.

It’s six o’clock when Yvette pauses on her way back to the cupboard to read a text from Julia and tell her she can be late, because the soup is still simmering. Yvette has set the table by the time she has combatted the dread that starts to trickle in her stomach. Around a glass pitcher of water, two antique pink glasses sit surrounded by small battery-powered candles. Soft white napkins hold two sets of copper cutlery, evenly spaced. Yvette remembers to add the fingerling potatoes to the pot before the meat gets too tender, then continues her meandering through the apartment. She moves her shoes to one side of the doormat so there is room for one more pair, then shifts her jackets two hooks to the left to leave an empty space closest to the door. One hook for a coat, and one for a purse. A pair of slippers is placed next to the doormat, and the washroom is freshly stocked with her best hand soap. She sets out two wine glasses on the table, two cups for soft drinks on the counter, and two mugs on the living room coffee table. The kettle is ready to brew, and she has made sure there were creams of various densities in the fridge.

Deep inside Yvette, buried in the soil of her chest, is a daydream. It sits hidden like a root vegetable, and anytime Yvette tugs it up she imagines a counter with two keys on it, each with their own chains. She imagines pulling apart string cheese and handing it to someone else, sitting on a rug she did not pick out herself, smelling perfume that’s different than her own. Opening a window in the morning, the washroom already foggy when she goes to shower. She imagines three or four or five sets of dishes in the sink. Unfamiliar socks in the same laundry basket as hers. She imagines a nauseating happiness that coats her mouth like caramel.

On the best days, she closes her eyes and pictures people, more people than she’s ever had, that come and go from her house as they wish. She imagines her corkboard full of photos, her couch threadbare in the middle where everyone loves to sit. There are times when it feels so vivid, so real— her shoulder squeezed in passing, her name mentioned from the other room,

being asked to bring that dish from that night when visiting a friend of a friend. She imagines a not-prairie, a not-Saskatchewan—a world full of people who she can hear through the walls, living near enough they might as well be together, who could and would walk to sit on her couch instead of their own.

KASIA KACZMAREK

Yvette wants to one day get sick of other people. She hopes she will want to ride the subway alone and spend afternoons by herself. She wishes that there would be so many moments of tenderness that she would let herself grow soft like a peach. Maybe one day, if she’s very lucky, she will take it all for granted. Sometimes she wonders if there are people whose only meals come from shared tangerines, from mothers’ stews, from potluck dinners and hand-fed strawberries. She wonders what it’s like to be perpetually full, to never go to bed hungry. That’s the dream she holds closest to her heart—the one where she can turn away dinner and know there will be breakfast in the morning.

The stew is still simmering nicely when Yvette opens the lid to look at it. She lets the condensation drip off into the pot and sets the lid aside to grab her soft spoon. When she stirs it the vegetables move slowly through the thickened broth, and the soup exhales a bubbly boiling noise. The meat gives when she presses on it, and the potatoes seem soft enough to cut through. She wonders whether Julia likes her beef hard enough to chew or soft enough to mix into sauce, and instinctively she glances at her phone on the counter.

It’s half-past seven o’clock when Yvette sees a text that starts with an apology. Julia is no longer coming. Yvette’s heart tumbles around in her chest and her eyes fall to the pot in front of her, too much stew for just one. The steam rising from it burns her nose with spices, the same way the back of her neck burns hot with embarrassment. The boiling bubbles push her best ingredients all around the pot, her finely chosen vegetables coming up through the thick sauce for air and then getting swallowed again in the broil.

She is alone in an empty house, but voilà, dinner is made.

Yvette puts her trembling hands on the handles and lifts the great pot, fighting to keep her balance as the stew sloshes around inside. Her palms turn clammy with stress, and the sweat slips between her skin and the wood of the handles. The contents of the pot begin to slide to one side, and in her panic, one of the handles slips from her grasp.

The pot breaks away from her. She watches it fall, mouth opening for a gasp. Metal hits hardwood.

The stew pushes the lid out of the way and pours out like a wave, coating everything it can reach. Yvette stoops and sets the pot upright, but the blood is already spilled. Carrots, potatoes, onions, and herbs are scattered across her

floor. They stick up like islands in a sea of brown sauce, wet and steaming hot. Yvette’s stomach has sunk all the way to the ground and is dipping into the mess. The liquid continues to ooze, the fat coagulating on top in rapidly cooling little bubbles, claiming territory with urgency.

Yvette is on fire. She does not feel her body walk to find towels to clean, nor does she flinch when the scalding stew leaves her hands burning and red. What she does feel is terror, and what she thinks about is getting lost in the grassland and losing sight of the dim houselight. She feels something like rage build up in her small body, and she thinks about how difficult it was to convince someone to sit in her kitchen and put her food in their mouth. Would she have to shovel the food inside a mouth that wasn’t hers? Pump their jaw with her own hand to chew for them? If her food hadn’t been quite so intolerable all her life maybe everyone would come to her first with their empty stomachs.

The next time Yvette looks up from the ground the light in the room is slightly tinged yellow, and surveying the space where the spill once was she cannot seem to find any brown. Her stomach is so empty it’s eating itself. She finds what she salvaged, hot but no longer steaming, and serves it for herself. The meat looks soft and tender, kept on the heat almost long enough that it falls apart. She is looking at it, just looking, and even her eyes are heavier than they were.

She places herself delicately on a dining chair, knees pressed together to keep from shaking. Yvette sniffs and brings the bowl close. The warmth of it seeps through the ceramic into her skin. She cradles it with both palms like a tender living thing, holding it just under her chin; she holds the bowl in what is to her a fetal position, the primal way a mother feeds soup to an ailing child. She spoons the stew into her mouth and finds it overwhelmingly spiced. The onions, the garlic, the rosemary and the thyme and the chives— she doesn’t taste and smell them as much as she feels them in her nose and her mouth and the pores on her cheeks. It’s far too much, a human thing, and so there could never really be enough. It feels horrifically hers; it feels exactly like anything she could’ve made. Yvette spoons more and more stew into her mouth and wonders if it’s the meat that is oversalted or if it’s the tears streaming down her face that made their way into the bowl. Eventually, the spoon is scraping ceramic, and life is easier to chew than when there is

hunger. She turns on the TV and rolls up her sleeves, then she and her full stomach begin to clean.

She replaces the dish towels with clean ones and clears the sink. Little people on her screen hug their friends and get too drunk and mess around with each other. The cutting boards are rinsed, and she wipes the counters where she chopped vegetables that left stickiness behind. Her limbs move slower than they did before, and nothing wipes down quite as well. Yvette laughs at every joke in the show and skips the parts that make her sad. The grease on the stovetop takes a few passes to clean, and there is still a sheen when she’s finished. She picks up her phone and sends Julia a text, she says that’s no problem! and let’s do this another time and everything she is supposed to say, and she puts her hand on her chest when it starts to ache a little bit. There is a moment, sometime between episodes, where Yvette is distracted by the sound of her neighbours laughing upstairs and stomping around above her head. She tries not to think of the soup on the floor or on her hands, and she tries not to look at the second set of dishes on the table just yet. She had made a good stew, after all, and she cleaned the kitchen, and she chose the best meat and the freshest veg and the prettiest plates and she laid them out for someone else. And that effort-won food, even spilled on the ground, it existed. She thinks that maybe love is not like stew; you can spill it everywhere and waste it and it still will have been good for something.

When Yvette goes to sleep at nine o’clock, the second set of dishes are clean and waiting in their cabinets. There is still a space next to her shoes, and a hook left free on the coat rack. The throw blanket is sitting on the ottoman, and mugs are at the ready on the coffee table. A speck of brown sauce is drying under the kitchen cabinet where Yvette did not see. Yvette is retreating to bed, and though her heart is raw and stinging, she is lucky to have a heart that is hers, that is used. That, and a kitchen that does not stay pristine.

Yvette’s body is a prairie. Her heart is a little house made of mortar and stone, and her words are the breath of smoke rising from the chimney, and her longing is in the kettle boiling enough water for two. Her love is the porch light always left on.

Out of Limbo

NGHI NGUYEN

CW: Subtance use, death, queerphobia

On Wednesday, I get off from work and don’t have a shift again until Saturday. I smoke a joint on the way to my apartment, listening to my boyfriend’s terrible indie-rock music he made with his band. God, the songs are terrible, they really are—I can’t spot a single good rhyme—but I miss Beau and his voice. He won’t be back for another week and I’ve only got him to look forward to.

When I get inside, I pour Smirnoff directly into my mouth, careful not to let the mouth of the bottle touch mine.

I hate waiting for anything. Empty time fills me with dread and I wish God could fold pleats in the fabric of my life so I can skip over these moments of limbo.

But He can’t, so I try being my own god. I shower, dress in only my boxers, brush my teeth. The substances lull me and I get into my unmade bed, a mattress on the floor. Five p.m. and the sun and I are having a sleepover.

I was nine when I realised that waiting shoved me into an anxious state that made it hard to breathe.

My uncle had landed a job as a cook on the Rocky Mountaineer, a sightseeing train that took you through the Rockies. My family got free tickets to ride to Banff because of him. Along the train ride, my brother and I glued our sticky faces to the window, wanting so badly to spot a grizzly bear. Seeing animals was one of the big advertisements of the company, but alas the ride was bearless.

I was still smart enough to be thankful, conscious that the trip was a rare privilege. All was good until we had to get back to Vancouver using a Greyhound bus.

The damned bus was supposed to come at ten p.m. We arrived early at the station on the edge of town. I had been raised in big cities all my life. I wasn’t used to Banff’s flatness and smallness. Night in the city is never truly dark, but in Banff, you couldn’t be sure if your eyes were open. The light bulb at the bus station shone in utter solitude like the Narnia lamppost, attracting a swarm of midges and mosquitoes.

The dark’s a damn lot scarier when the public trash can says “BEAR PROOF” like some badge of honour. I thought we were going to get eaten, straight up, lost to the British Columbian wilderness that I had been so eager to see. The fear of bears and the apprehension of waiting for something with no certain arrival time made me combust.

I started crying hysterically by eleven o’clock. My brother called me a sissy and my mother ignored me.

Under the Narnia light, my ba pulled me into him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and buried my face into the soft belly of his second-hand jacket. “My boy doesn’t have to be scared of anything,” he told me, “as long as I’m with him.”

And I quieted, the simple logic infallible to me.

My ba died six months ago. Incapacitated, I put school on hold and started working full-time.

For two days, I hibernate like a bear. I come to the fridge to stuff cold cheese and bread into my mouth when my stomach rumbles and drink when I feel restless. In the dead of Friday night, I go down to the garden of the church next door to smoke, the alcohol having not submerged me enough.

My iPhone alarm tears through my skull on Saturday morning. I open my eyes and the bedroom’s still dark as that bus station in Banff. I stand and fumble to hit the lights. The cold slaps my pantless legs and I shiver terribly.

(Fuck you, winter sun, for sleeping in after the party’s over.)

I put on the stiff kitchen uniform from Wednesday. My stomach hurts, I’m so hungry, but I only grab the bread and tear off a chunk of cheese from

the block. I bite into each food item separately, then wash it down with tap water.

Before too many thoughts can occupy my mind, I plug in my earphones and blast Beau’s music. I leave the house early. I’ll walk to work instead of sneaking onto the bus and I’ll smoke a joint along the way. I want to traverse Toronto today with my head as hollow as a cave.

BIEW BIEW SAKULWANNADEE

I’m a line cook at an American diner called Sunny’s. I check my eyes in my phone camera before I enter; they’re reddish but not glazed over so I can blame it on allergies.

For eight hours in a sauna-hot kitchen, I flip pancakes and eggs and yell “Order up!” two hundred times. We’re so busy during the rush, the order bills spill onto the ground when they’re being printed. It’s stressful how fast-paced the shift is but I’d rather be stressed than thinking. My aversion to waiting makes me a fast worker, and fortunately, because no one has quit in the last three weeks, the kitchen today is an equally efficient ecosystem.

There’s only one rude delivery app driver today (and we usually have at least three). He stuck his head through the pass window and, clenching my fist around my spatula, I was tempted to smack him in the face like a WhacA-Mole.

I pray no one enters the door when it’s fifteen minutes to closing. I’m starting to clean my grill when I see the door swing in my periphery. I curse and crank the heat back on. Then I look up to a man taking off his snowpainted toque.

Fucking hell.

“Surprise!” Beau says, throwing up his hands.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I yell through the pass window.

“I got back early.” He sits down at the booth and talks to the server sweeping up her section. Poor Nilani smiles shyly, thinking he’s flirting with her. Beau is so charming and his face is soft like a cherub’s. Everyone falls in love with him.

Yet, right now, I feel so unready for his presence.

I close my station and pat the dishwasher’s shoulder because he’ll be here for a while. Beau and I step out of the restaurant and the sun’s already setting, turning the sky from tinfoil grey to asphalt grey. We start walking east of Front Street, heading towards the apartment which is north on Church. Fresh snow crunches under our feet. When we get far away enough from Sunny’s, Beau kisses me.

“I missed you,” he said, drawing out his last syllable so his supple lips come together. He snatches my hand and holds it.

“I missed you too,” I say. I want to say more and kiss him more, but my

mind can’t conjure the words and my body feels like a shed exoskeleton I can no longer control.

“How was your day?” he prompts.

I want to tell him about my Whac-A-Moling urges, but the ability to joke has slipped from underneath me. “New day, same shit. Do you have a cigarette?”

From the corner of my eye, I study his face to see if he’s offended that I’m not talking more, but his expression is still relaxed. He takes the box from his cargo pocket and passes me a cigarette. His Status card allows him to buy cigarettes and weed tax-free, so I only get them from him.

I light the cigarette and take a puff. The tingle of nicotine comforts me and gives me a little control back into my body and voice.

As we walk we pass the cigarette back and forth. I laugh and give short responses at the right spots when Beau recounts his Winnipeg trip. He did mushrooms and skated on a not-too-frozen lake and exploded fireworks in a deserted church. “Fuck those colonial missionaries!” he yells while holding his middle fingers to the sky. He’s wild but the way he tells his stories is wilder. I wish he would desert his band and become a novelist or actor.

Because I love the way he reminisces about the past, with his eyes sparkling so brightly you could find stars swimming in them.

I’m trying to quit smoking. I’m not stupid; I’ve seen my share of lung cancer PSAs. It’ll be a New Year’s resolution but next year’s problems are for next year.

I only started out of desperation, when my mother threatened to kill me.

I was fourteen. I came out—I had to, for the feeling of hiding that part of myself tore me apart—and my mother went ballistic. I hadn’t done anything with anyone yet. My mother threatened that if I stepped just one more step in hell’s direction, I was dead to her. I was too old for her to beat me, but her words and tone still sliced into me with the sharpness of a scalpel. She screamed at me for all of an hour, while my ba sat on the sofa bed, shaking his head silently, looking abashed for what I had done.

My father could protect me from bears, but against my mother who was twice as lethal, we were equally defenceless. I know he was never fond of arguing with my mother, which meant fueling a forest fire that had sparked

unpredictably. But his passivity pained me and I began to resent him for it.

Uninterrupted, my mother’s fire burned me. After that scolding, I wanted to hurt myself. I asked a senior the next day for a cigarette and paid him five whole bucks for ten minutes of hollowness.

The apartment is thankfully clean enough when Beau sees it. I used to make my space so messy when I hibernated but I knew I had to change that habit when I moved in with Beau. The bread and cheese diet means no dishes in the sink.

I take a shower to rinse the kitchen grime off my skin. I don’t have time to pat myself down with a towel before, emerging through thick steam, Beau wraps his arms around me. Droplets from my skin soak into his pants and t-shirt. I can feel his groin hard against my thigh. “Can we fuck in the shower?” he asks me, throat gravelly.

“I can’t.” I add, not wanting him to feel stupid for asking, “I want to, but just—No. I’m tired. Sorry, Beau.”

“Okay,” he says. “Don’t be sorry. I should be sorry. Sorry.” He steps out and waits for me to dress in my (clean) sweatpants and hoodie.

I crouch down with Beau on the edge of the mattress we share. I smell my weed and alcohol on the sheets and I feel embarrassed. I pray he can’t tell what I’ve been doing the past two days.

Beau looks at me quizzically, then he prompts, “Something on your mind?”

My mother always described me as sensitive. When I was really young, I cried over everything, when I fell and skinned a knee, when my brother bullied me.

Days when my mother scolded or beat me were the worst. I remember nights when there was no end to my crying. I was conscious of wanting to stop. The time was late and my eyes were sore, but with every new, overwhelming wave of sadness, the tears would come back. My frail dam that kept me together had been shattered yet again. I felt… unloved. That’s what it was. I felt so awfully alone.

But my ba knew the secret to ceasing my tears. When the rest of the house was in bed, he would place me behind him on his motorbike. I would

hug his waist to secure myself and rest my face against his back. We would drive out and around Saigon where the night was perpetually summery and the streetlamps were golden. Almost always, the moon would shine brightly white. The Saigon breeze hitting my face and my ba’s warm back calmed me in a way no drug is capable of.

“My—” I start. I look at Beau with my jaw slacked, my words stuck in my throat. I feel paralysed exactly like that day I got the phone call from my brother.

“Come here,” Beau says gently, grabbing my wrist and leading me so that we’re sitting cross-legged on the mattress. “Did something bad happen while I was gone?”

“No.” My ba passed well before Beau’s trip. Beau occupied my brain, and then he left and my only choice was to sleep. “Happened a while ago,” I say. I tell Beau how half a year before now my dad died and, too terrified of the truth, I didn’t show up to his funeral.

I hated my childhood and did everything in my power to rope adulthood closer to me.

I left for university across the country when I was sixteen. In Toronto, I would make a career for myself. I would show my mother that though I was all the dirty slurs she had called me, I was not corrupted. I would succeed and make her respect me.

I overloaded my classes so that I could finish university in three years. On my calendar, I planned every second of my day so I could never have empty time. I didn’t care that I wasn’t sleeping or had any friends. I booked time to be happy later. This period of schooling was only liminal and would be over as soon as I blinked.

My mother called me about once every month. My ba never called, only texted every day that he missed me.

I miss you.

I miss you.

I miss you.

I never responded to those texts. I never called. I never fucking called the last person who loved me.

Tears waterfall out of me for the first time in years.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Beau says and he embraces me. I straddle my legs around his waist and bring him tighter against me. I want to be so close to his body, he absorbs into me and becomes one. That way he could never be hurt and I could never lose him. Beau was never part of my plan, but he’d fallen into my life like a shooting star.

I rub my face into the crook of his neck like a cat. I breathe in his scent. He smells of sweat and tobacco and home, the only home I’ve got now.

Don’t blink.

My sobs subside after an hour and Beau lets go of me to grab us both water. I chug the glass, wetting my throat that’s dry from coughing and heaving. The water spills down my chin and I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Beau sits next to me and rubs a hand on my thigh. “How’re you feeling?” he asks. “I can leave you alone for a bit—”

“No,” I object. “Stay.”

He smiles. “We can watch a movie? Get your mind off of things.”

I am seized by the thought that, actually, I want to get my mind on to something. As if burned, I spring away from the mattress and stand up, unable to bear the scent of my hibernation any longer. I look down at Beau and ask, “You wanna go somewhere?”

Surprise widens his eyes. “Like on a walk?”

“No, go somewhere and do something.”

“You have work tomorrow.”

“I don’t give a shit. And it’s only six o’clock.”

“What do you want to do then?”

I search through my mind, trying to remember what I’ve overheard the servers gossip about. “The skate rink downtown is open until late, right?”

He stands up and grins even wider. “You skate like a horse trying to dance.”

I pull in his angelic head and kiss his smile. “But I know you’re damn good at it, and I will simply hold on to you.”

Anecdotes From a Brother to a Swan

ELISA KOGAN PENHA

CW: Death, child abuse

I.

This is a story about a swan.

On the evening of its third birthday, the swan that Crawforde Henning had been hunting since June was, at last, shot out of the sky. Crawforde hurried to where the bird had fallen—the white, beautifully monstrous thing that it was—only to find a bleeding, fair-haired toddler in its place. The boy was wailing. Crawforde took a moment to be bewildered before he lifted the snivelling child and lugged him as he would have lugged game towards his loghouse. Crawforde, an uninspired man, called the boy Cygnus, and cared for him alongside his own son, Lysander, who was one at the time, and thus uninterested in a mutant brother. Crawforde moved Cygnus and Lysander to London when the boys were fourteen and twelve respectively, on account of Cygnus beginning to transform back into a swan on the seventeenth of every month, like clockwork. Crawforde signed Cygnus to a playhouse, and each month he would wrestle Cygnus into a cage and draw it onto the playhouse stage. Audience after audience would marvel as Cygnus collapsed violently to his knees—like a tree after a volcanic ash rain, brittle and made of dust— and as the skin on his shoulders began to writhe and tear, wings crowning through. His mouth flattened and his eyes shrank and deepened from brown to black. Crawforde took a sizable cut from Cygnus’ shows.

On the evening of his eighteenth birthday, Cygnus Henning, the boyswan, died onstage.

When Lysander turned eighteen, he sued his father and won for everything Crawforde had. The legal debacle was covered in a Daily Mail

article titled “London’s Own Rumpelstiltskin: The Henning Trial” by Suzane Riverty. There were seven films about Cygnus made in four years and two of them won Academy Awards. The Boy Swan by Simon Alnwick has been first on the New York Times bestseller list for the last five months. It’s the twentieth “retelling” of Cygnus’ story that Lysander has read. Nobody has ever written a book on Lysander.

This is a story about a boy. Lysander Henning is twenty-five and living in Edinburgh. He is ridiculously wealthy and entirely alone, in a cavernous flat filled mostly with textbooks and precariously balanced candles. He is a PhD candidate in molecular biology. It’s the third thing you’d learn about him if you hovered over his name, underlined in blue, on Cygnus Henning’s Wikipedia page. The first thing would be his relation to Cygnus, the second would be his fully-funded undergraduate degree at Oxford, and the third would be the lawsuit, which was tired news.

Lysander used to do public appearances. He was on talk shows both with Cygnus and about him, post-mortem, during the trial. He used to be fiery—that’s what the reporters loved to call him. “Fiery and familial Lysander Henning defends brother, Cygnus, from fluke rumours.” “London’s bad-boy, fiery Lysander Henning, develops his own cult-following in his brother Cygnus’ fandom!” But parading around the winged corpse of his brother wasn’t something Lysander fancied himself doing forever, and so “fiery” became “reclusive”—“Reclusive Lysander Henning turns down BBC interview.” “What happened to Lysander Henning, Cygnus Henning’s reclusive brother?”—and soon “reclusive” became nothing at all.

The playhouse where Lysander had spent the bulk of his remembered life was torn down three weeks ago. Lysander almost took the train into London just to watch the damn thing fall. Lysander lives in between his flat and the laboratories of Edinburgh University, and sometimes people give him strange looks, but nobody speaks to him. Lysander Henning is twenty-five and he has not used his voice in days. He came home this evening and shouted. No words—just a guttural scream, as if to prove he had not vanished completely. Lysander Henning is an ordinary man living in the epilogue of an extraordinary story. He massages his throat and coughs, awkwardly, before he eats the rest of his sogging salad from that lunch, and changes from the clothes he wears every day into the clothes he wears every night. It’s a hollow

and often harrowing life, but Lysander supposes he is lucky to have a life at all.

II.

When he was five or six, Lysander started to investigate himself in the bathroom mirror, twisting his body around and trying to get a look at his shoulders. Cygnus told him “I used to be a bird,” and so Lysander thought this must mean he was a bird too. Then, he and Cygnus were still living in the loghouse, and Lysander still believed he and Cygnus were related through birth. Lysander threw a tantrum when Crawforde told him otherwise.

III.

This is a story about a psychic. It was a cold Sunday at the playhouse when Lysander first spoke to Edgar Coombe. He was the only other boy there of Lysander’s age, save for Cygnus, and he could—allegedly—see the future. Edgar usually performed before Cygnus. His mum would shuffle him onstage and he would pick volunteers. Lysander sat cross-legged in the wings and watched him—he was fifteen. Edgar would say, “Somebody here is getting married soon,” and the crowd would roar. Then Edgar would say, “Would a Mr. and soon-to-be Mrs. Newfield make themselves known?”

Edgar came offstage that time, and while Crawforde wrangled Cygnus into his cage, Lysander said, “It’s horseshit.”

Edgar turned. “What?”

“I saw your mum paying off the Newfields,” Lysander told him, with a jut of his chin.

Edgar did not look embarrassed. “I obviously can’t see into the future. That would be ridiculous.”

“I knew it—”

“I can only see the past.”

Lysander stammered. “And I’m supposed to believe that instead?”

“You believe in your brother,” said Edgar.

“That’s different.” Lysander watched as Cygnus was pulled onstage. “You’ve seen him.”

Edgar squinted at Lysander. “You lost your first tooth because you ran face-first into a tree, and the first time you went swimming you nearly

drowned in Fable Lake.”

“Excuse me?”

“You bought that jacket at a thrift shop in Camden on your thirteenth birthday, and last year, you were surprised it still fit,” Edgar continued, “but your brother made a joke, something like, ‘did you really think you’d grow that much? I think you shrank.’”

“Quit it!” Lysander ordered.

“People don’t like that one as much,” Edgar said, nodding solemnly, “which is why I mostly do the other thing. There’s no harm in it.”

Lysander supposed Edgar was right, but he was never going to say as much. Lysander and Edgar were friends, eventually, and with Cygnus, too. The three of them played cards in their dressing rooms and Lysander and Edgar went to the same sixth form college. Cygnus did not go to school—he was not allowed. He had some tutors. Cygnus was confined to the playhouse like Rapunzel in a tower. Some nights, Lysander and Edgar would break him out, and they would parade around London together, pretending to be discreet, though their photos would always end up in the tabloids (“Do people even read those anymore?” Edgar would say,) and on the internet. The world loved them: The boy-swan and the psychic and Lysander.

Lysander found it simple to pretend that Cygnus was not being abused. It was terrible, he knew so, he felt so, and the guilt was like a sea-borne flesheating amoeba, but still, he found it simple. After a show, once, Lysander helped Cygnus back into his clothes, because he was always sore when coming back into boy from swan.

“I’m sorry I can’t feel what you feel,” Lysander said to his brother. “I’m sorry that I have it so easy.”

It was the first time Lysander had ever said such a thing.

“Don’t,” Cygnus insisted. He grabbed the sides of Lysander’s face. “You aren’t accountable for him. You hurting wouldn’t hurt me less.”

“I wish we knew what you were,” Lysander said. “So we could help the change be less painful.”

“Or erase the change completely,” Cygnus said.

Lysander shook his head. He did not want Cygnus to be less of himself. He just wished being himself was not so agonizing.

“Maybe if I grew wings...” Lysander mused.

Cygnus pushed him away—gently—and he laughed. “I’d never pray that for anyone.”

IV.

An excerpt from an interview with Ian Winthorpe, on portraying Lysander Henning in The White Swan (2018).

STACEY MULLIGAN: What sort of research did you do, going into this role? Was it any different from the other biographical pictures you’ve done?

IAN WINTHORPE: It was! When I played young Dean Hughes last year, I mean, there’s so much information about him out there. And we spent so much time with his family, me and Antony, just to be sure everything was right. But with Lysander… I mean… What does anybody know about Lysander Henning? Really? I needed to give him something.He doesn’t really offer much.

V.

“Lysander...” Edgar began, “I know you hate it when I look into your past.”

“You’re right,” said Lysander, “I do.”

“But I did.”

Lysander sighed and rested his head on the velvet couch in Cygnus’ dressing room. Lysander was sixteen, and it was Cygnus’ eighteenth birthday, so the audience was more crowded than it had ever been. “Go on, then,”

Lysander said.

“Last night—”

Lysander sat up. “You’ve never looked that recent before!”

Edgar seemed only halfway guilty. He ignored Lysander’s embarrassed protest.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” Edgar said.

Lysander did not have time to confirm or deny the unspoken before he heard the bleating. Cygnus’ swan bleating, coming in shrieks from the stage, moaning in deep and pungent and terrible agony. Lysander and Edgar leaped

from the dressing room and ran onto stage but Cygnus was dead before they crossed the wings.

VI.

Lysander is beginning therapy for the third time in his life, and the first time since he moved to Scotland seven months ago. Lysander rehearses on his way: My brother is dead and my father is in jail. My father was an evil man but never to me. We all moved on from the existence of boys who were swans and became boys too quickly. But when he sat in the armchair across from one Dr. Winstanley he was only able to speak of the dreadful Scottish weather for forty-five minutes, then stare in silence for the last fifteen, before his hour was up. He made another appointment anyway.

VII.

This is a story about a magical forest. It is a forest that the souls of the dead pass through when they become confused, or shuffled off incorrectly by the wind, and so they float aimlessly through the winding maze of trees until they manage to reroute themselves. This is a peculiar purgatory, however, because there does not exist the distinction between a pathway for the souls of people and a pathway for the souls of animals, and so—more often than one might think—they collide like stars and become tangled, mist within mist. The souls argue. The soul of the boy wishes to carry on to the body of a child, to start a life anew, but the soul of the swan cannot imagine ever needing to live life with two feet and no wings.

This time—and this is rarer, too, than one might think—the swan won, pulling both its own soul and that of the boy into the body of a young bird. This creature loved these woods. It made a job of guiding spirits through them, pulling lost souls behind it in a train, and untangling collisions like knots in hair. The swan-boy is more than a playful child, but a protector, and the woods are more than flora, but a home.

When the man-made metal of the bullet hits the swan-boy, the boy’s soul becomes suddenly agitated, longing for a return to his world, his material culture, his language, his ground, where he can run. The boy yanks himself from the swan, but the swan falls with him, careening to the ground, and landing roughly as a toddler.

As the boy grows, so does the swan, and the swan learns, eventually, that it can sometimes find an opening, and push, and push, until the swan comes out once more. When the boy-swan dies, the woods, of course, live on. But it is a terrible place now. Where children live inside of unwilling animals and where animals find themselves stuck in the still bodies of children who cannot yet walk. Perhaps one day a protector will come again. It is entirely uncertain.

VIII.

This could be a love story, if Lysander let it. Lysander returns Edgar’s phone call for the first time in years.

Lysander says to him: “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to share my grief.”

Edgar looks into Lysander’s past and says nothing of it. “I’ll be on the next train.”

IX.

Lysander Henning is twenty-six years old and he is doing much better.

X.

The constellation Cygnus does not resemble a swan but it does resemble an older brother. End.

About the Authors

Selena Mercuri is studying Creative Writing and Political Science at the University of Toronto. She was the recipient of the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award in Creative Writing, and she is published in an anthology called The Hamthology: Ham Sandwich Literature. Selena has also been published in the Trinity Review, the Hart House Review, and the Innis Herald.

Lily Mengual is a first-year student from New College hoping to major in English! As well as creative writing, she enjoys extensive reading, watching rom-coms, and participating in trivia. She is currently working on her eighth novel (and hoping it will be her first good one!).

Victoria Bortolussi is a third-year double majoring in English and Anthropology with a minor in Creative Expression & Society. She is an avid reader, obsessive writer, and has an insatiable appetite for self-criticism. She enjoys writing about long Californian summers, nostalgia, and her enigmatic childhood.

Roza Sapir is a fiction writer from Nashville, Tennessee who currently studies Literature and Critical Theory at U of T.

Johanna Kiik is a first-year life sciences student at Trinity College, majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Cell and Molecular Biology, with a minor in English. She loves writing odd short stories and poetry, and grew up around parents who highly valued literature. Outside of writing, she adores

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

performing music, learning about wild, edible and medicinal plants, and watching many period dramas.

Shirley Yue Chen is a third year student studying English, Philosophy, and Book and Media Studies. She loves bubble tea (0% sugar, no ice) and fiction (the more speculative the better). You may also find her in Trinity Times and other U of T journals. Thanks for reading!

Stella Dos Santos is a second-year student at Victoria College pursuing a specialist in Linguistics and a major in Cognitive Science of Language and Cognition. She is honoured to say that this is her first time being published with the brilliant storytellers at the Goose. In her writing, she tries to capture the world as it exists—intricate, strange, small, and oftentimes a little mundane. She understands it if you find her stories a little boring, and she thanks those who read them anyway.

Nghi Nguyen is an English Specialist at the University of Toronto. He was born in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam; raised in Vancouver, BC; and subsequently writes fiction about having to call many places home. His work has been featured in the Hart House Review and The Gargoyle. He dreams to be a librarian, an author of fantasy novels, and a caretaker of many cats.

Elisa Kogan Penha is a first-year humanities student with plans to double-major in Classics and Celtic Studies, and minor in Medieval Studies. She is a lover of early 2000’s emo bands, the poems of Richard Siken, and over analysing Percy Jackson novels. She will usually be found writing stories about winged people, or a melodramatic personal essay.