Soliloquies 19.1

SOL I LO QU I 19.1 E S

SOL I LO QU I 19.1 E S CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY’S UNDERGRADUATE LITERARY JOURNAL

Editorial Board 2014–2015 Editor-in-Chief: Rachel Rosenberg Managing Editor: Annah–Lauren Bloom Creative Director: Gersande La Fleche Online Editors: Travis Wall and Carlos Fuentes Fiction Editors: Rudrapriya Rathore, Hailey Wendling, Fawn Parker Poetry Editors: Jenny Smart, Jacqueline Hanna, Parker Baldin, Kailey Havelock Graphic Designer / Art Director: Maxwell Addington

Copyright © 2014 Soliloquies Anthology

All rights reserved.

Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this anthology may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author of the text.

ISBN 978-1-77185-370-5 Manufactured in Canada Printed in Montreal on recycled paper by Rubiks Typeset in Adobe Devanagari Design, layout and illustrations by Maxwell Addington For keen readers: there are precisely three purposeful typos hidden within this book—can you spot them?

For a prize, send proof to: Soliloquies Anthology, c/o Concombria Uvinersity, Department of English 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8 soliloquies.ca

CONTENTS A Letter from the Editor 1 POETRY LAUNDRY Tess Liem 7 IMPERATIVE Tess Liem 8 HAIR Holly Day 10 FACTS OF LIFE Alex Robichaud 11 HOSTAGES Simon Banderob 12 THE THAW Sasha Tate–Howarth 14 TWO CRIMES Ronan Nanning–Watson 15 WHEN I THINK OF VANCOUVER, I THINK OF OLD PEOPLE AND DRUG ADDICTS Tara McGowan–Ross 18 CHINESE RESTAURANT WITH BROTHER Mia Poirier 19 I’VE TOLD YOU BEFORE, BARS AREN’T FOR ME Mia Poirier 20 EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE Kristal Kordich–Crandall 21 THE RHINO AT THE ZOO John Grey 22 ABOUT THAT SHEEP FARMER John Grey 24 A FAMILY OUTING Carousel Calvo 25 FICTION CHOOK Nicholas Xuereb 29 LET LIE Emily Piperni 35 RITE Jill Talbot 47 SMALL FIRES Graeme Shorten Adams 49 AT THE CORE OF IT Mikaila Hanman Siegersma 57 Contributors 69

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

S

oliloquies and I go back a long time. 10 years, in fact. I haven’t worked on it for that long, but I started at Concordia back in ol’ 2003, left to find my as-yet-unfound fortune, and then returned in 2013. This journal has been an integral and exciting part of the English department for so long that I still remember the little flyers handed out for submission call-outs (Facebook was not a thing yet).

This anthology has always been a space for new ideas, providing opportunities for writers to flourish. Back then, I never imagined I’d be Editor-in-Chief, directing a team of talented editors and designers so you guys could hold this book in your probably mittened hands. (I mean, I don’t want to make assumptions about what you wear, but I just have a sort of feeling.)

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EDITOR’S LETTER

We always read submissions blind so we can avoid the murky waters of nepotism. But even though we publish people from all over the world, we always want to throw a big—and perhaps sweater-themed —party to allow Montreal-based poets and authors a chance to share their work with an interested, responsive audience. This journal is where a lot of Montreal writers are published for the first time, and that is such a satisfying thing to be a part of. The first time that I received an acceptance letter for something I’d written, I was fourteen years old.

No one else was home—this was the time before small children owned their own cell phones—and I distinctly remember being so excited that I walked around my house proudly talking to myself. Yes. It’s true.

We write because we need to, because we have things to say that refuse to remain unsaid. The best thing about working on Soliloquies is that warm, cozy feeling from knowing that you are helping someone find their voice. That’s what a soliloquy is: the expression of a voice through lecture or speech or some sort of dramatic outpouring. I’m proud to publish such an awesome batch of dreamers, nihilists and otherwise creative people. This includes fiction by Emily Piperni, Graeme Shorten Adams, Mikaila Hanman Siegersma, and Nicholas Xeureb—all current students at Concordia. We have an amazing Flash Fiction winner, Jill Talbot, from Gabriola Island, British Columbia. Our poets come from all over: John Grey from Australia, Holly Day from the U.S. and British Columbia’s Ronan Nanning–Watson. Still we had a lot of Montreal-based writers this year, including Mia Poirier, Alex Robichaud, Tara McGowan–Ross, Tess Liem, Simon Banderob, Kristal Kordich–Crandall, Carousel Calvo and Sasha Tate–Howarth.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

I’d like to thank our graphic design team and the editorial board, all of whom worked like crazy when I decided to create a physical paper edition of 19.1 about a week into October. I’m forever indebted to last year’s wonderful Editor-in-Chief, Colleen Romaniuk, who offered me guidance in exchange for copies of the Hunger Games trilogy. Colleen answered my paranoid late-night text queries in a way that was endlessly supportive. Thanks also to Andy Fidel, last year’s head online editor, who volunteered to take professional photos for us because she believes in Soliloquies. Finally, thank you to the Concordia Association of Students in English and the Arts and Science Federation of Associations for ongoing financial support, printing help and for sponsoring cool events Soliloquies can attend and pimp itself out at.

Enjoy the stories and poems contained herein. I hope they keep you cozy during minus-thirty-degree Montreal nights. We’ll see you in the Spring.

Rachel Rosenberg Editor-in-Chief

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P O E T R Y

TESS LIEM

TESS LIEM

LAUNDRY

I am tired of learning and of doing laundry.

Hang our only sheets so they are dry before the sun sinks, so we can sleep.

When you pin our clothes to the line I can hear you humming a song that your mother used to sing because you never learned the words.

I hang on the tune, like a kid on a swing.

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POETRY

TESS LIEM

IMPERATIVE

Turn up the heat and open the window but close the curtains then find a measuring tape and use it to pin point the precise middle of your bedroom as far as possible from the radiator, the bed, the window, the closet, the door, and make a pile of clothing, and blankets, and pillows, and anything you’d be ok with sleeping on if you were really tired (and you are really tired) and keep going until you have made a cave, and you are hibernating and keep going until you forget that you are not in fact a bear then realign your body so that your head is where your feet were 8

TESS LIEM

and imagine what your feet might dream about in this new orientation and keep going until loneliness feels like a person you used to know who passes you on the street on a cold day with her collar up shoulders shrugged just barely noticing you at all.

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POETRY

HOLLY DAY

HAIR

I remember every haircut I gave my son, the first thin, white curls that tumbled to the ground like feathers, the thicker golden curls that had enough heft and weight to clump together in drifts that needed repeated sweepings, the thick, straight hair he had as a teenager, still golden but stiff and bristly at the ends.

Each time, I wonder at the handfuls of hair I’m left with, am stricken with the desire to package the hair, label it with the year, put it away for future reference, reflect on how welcome the smell of a box of my child’s hair would be in a far-off future when he’s grown.

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ALEX ROBICHAUD

ALEX ROBICHAUD

FACTS OF LIFE

Babies are soft organic matter.

Babies are compostable.

Babies are about 85% water.

They dry with age.

Roughly the same as a fresh potato.

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POETRY

SIMON BANDEROB

HOSTAGES

You and I have each other surrounded.

You and I may have wants, but no demands, and certainly not of each other for we certainly have nothing to say that is not left said by these, our hostages.

Because I have your tupperware and you have my good pen and I have your Hitchcock movies and you have my hoodie and I have your copies of Cloud Atlas, The Watchmen and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez, peace be upon his soul, which I underlined, annotated, highlighted and dog-eared the hell out of, and you have my Rilke poems and my DVD of Withnail and I (starring Richard E. Grant) along with my box set of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the best of and my hostages include your ten thousand huddled apologies leaning into the stony walls of every inbox I own and your hostages include all of the epic theatre confessions I made from the first time we got drunk together on red wine and Thai food 12

SIMON BANDEROB

and my hostages include the thick bags of broken promise shards with your return address on it and your hostages include my wilted manifesto I-love-yous and our hostages include the other’s side of the couch– do you have any idea how much my electronics have suffered for you?

My cellphone broke its back on your bad news, my laptop went to troubled sleep for the week you were borrowing my charger, rather the day you borrowed my charger and the following six I couldn’t bear to talk to you about it and I took to throwing pens against the wall: the ink stains point in every direction at nothing in particular.

I keep clear the side of the bed you like, closest to the wall, I sleep next to your demilitarised zone, your autobahn roadblock, your holy prison silence, your Jerusalem closer to the wall.

We crouch over each other’s accrued libraries; you have my books and I have your movies and if we can’t go home, then neither shall they.

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POETRY

SASHA TATE–HOWARTH

THE THAW

Dark ice at night: walk all the way to snake island.

Leave small red stones, rusted wire to find after the thaw.

After two days I forget – instead steep tea with sage and honey.

I am bruising the way water does after forty hours of rain.

Tides rising, migrations: I drive thirteen hours through fog.

Awake under a pulling moon, I stick memos on the fridge: boil water, sweeten, stay.

The river floods.

I remind myself to try harder.

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RONAN NANNING–WATSON

RONAN NANNING–WATSON

TWO CRIMES or maybe it’s called: CRAWLING

INTO EVENING.

Two crimes are happening equidistantly apart I’m trying to write poems more narratively he broke in But let me finish Then you can tell me about what your poems are doing.

Two crimes are happening equidistantly apart I said when we received our coffees and sat down outside the window on the curb, basically on the curb.

—And these crimes are equidistant from you. Right?

OK, so?

Outside it was fairly different than inside because there were no beautiful women staring into screens or cell phones or lonesome men forty somethings with stubble scratching chins on their laptops, outside there was some snow and an empty street like there had been a general slaughter or a revolution but everyone inside had yet to notice. This should be a beer hall with rousing music and sex and death and potatoes everywhere, but it is not at all, it’s a dissatisfying, to almost unreality, coffee shop like a million others.

There was very little snow it was powdery, like our conversation, but it was sticking, like a bad habit made of snow.

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POETRY

OK so, which crime do you deal with first?

Suppose I don’t deal with any crimes.

What and just live and let live?

Yeah and just you know whatever right Right and just whatever I guess Yeah I guess so Well suppose you had moral fiber Moral fiber is a cancer of the soul. Let ‘let do’ be the sum of the law.

Let let do be. Letdoobee doobee doo.

And some more snow now on our hats, his is a baseball cap red wool I don’t know where he got it I would like it, and I am wearing a military surplus toque that’s nothing special but now both of them are a bit like frosted cakes or cereal dusted with icing sugar. Our coffee is strong. We are strong. We are strong men. (This is an epic poem.)

But suppose you did.

I would help the closest one.

Exactly.

It’s pragmatic.

Exactly.

That’s what you wanted to tell me?

Then he proceeded to tell me about a literary device that I don’t remember the name of but I remember a comparison he made saying that his heart was like a lending library for love criminals to rub through and not take 16

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anything because they would just write the name down and download the PDF at home. But he is still left with the fingerprints to prove they rubbed through, all over him, like scarabs over ancient Egypt and this cigar ash snow on this assassin’s afternoon that’s just crawling

into evening.

like a wet little guy into a sleeping bag.

Anyway the snow was something special.

17

POETRY

TARA McGOWAN–ROSS

WHEN I THINK OF VANCOUVER, I THINK OF OLD PEOPLE AND DRUG ADDICTS

you made it easy to be little girls, there where we grew small around your ankles and you always looked so huge, so lovely. the choke of your sobbing and the heroin sweetness of your voice. every dose is an overdose but I am curious and you know that. you wouldn’t want me to feel this way. it’s okay. nobody wants to feel this way. after eight years of ashes I asked the bright of the blue what it is to die the way you did.

I breathe deep the burning to sleep through the knowing, to sleep through the lonely, to sleep through words like halfbrother, orphan, and crystal meth, to sleep through “it probably hurt like hell”, and “he didn’t survive Vancouver.” it’s okay. nobody survives Vancouver.

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POETRY

MIA POIRIER

CHINESE RESTAURANT WITH BROTHER

We’re in Lucky Dragon on Spadina, a plate of chop suey bigger than my head on the table, daring me to eat it.

You go on about Chinese food, how it’s so dirty, can’t trust it.

I stab my thigh with a chopstick.

A kid is watching Tom & Jerry on a small TV ten feet away from us, laughing like he’s never been sad.

You say, “Chop suey isn’t even authentic,” and I consider chugging our entire bottle of low sodium soy sauce just to see your face.

The cook’s son is screaming about something but it’s in Cantonese.

You drop a wonton on your lap.

Your sweater hasn’t been washed in four days. It has grease and crumbs on it.

We’re here because you missed my birthday.

You say you don’t like the complementary oolong, so I drink the whole pot.

Later, I pee for 38 whole seconds.

19

MIA POIRIER

MIA POIRIER

I’VE TOLD YOU BEFORE, BARS AREN’T FOR ME

I didn’t like the laughter, or the music, and the way everything felt and sounded like an echo from far away. I liked you.

You, with your purple rain jacket and your bike helmet under your arm, like you were ready to bolt any second.

I didn’t want to go out for a drink, but that purple rain jacket looked so dorky on your lanky, stretched out arms, and you didn’t make me say yes.

You asked the waitress for straws to blow bubbles in your beer, like a four year old at Chuck E. Cheese.

You littered the table with tiny salt and pepper packets, said I had to “spice up my life,” and laughed at your inability to pun.

Today, I drank a glass of Tabasco sauce, to see if the sting could recreate the taste of that cold beer I didn’t want, at a bar I never asked to go to.

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KRISTAL KORDICH–CRANDALL

KRISTAL KORDICH–CRANDALL

EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE

A swollen hand may be manifested on only one side or both sides, based on what causes the problem. The term unilateral hand swelling is used for one-sided condition. While many people experience pain with swelling hands, others may not. It is obvious that hands and legs are among the most frequently used body parts. So pain, swelling, bruises, and other mild conditions are commonly experienced over these regions.

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POETRY

JOHN GREY

THE RHINO AT THE ZOO

Beyond the fence, the moat, between two gray boulders, an even greater, grayer boulder stands, a black rhino, more precious to the world than platinum.

He’s as stoic as his ponderous weight, allowing only a slight yawn and a swish of his fly-swatting tail to break the plane of his stillness.

One eye stares at me, the other rolls back into his thoughts, combining somewhere inside that horned head to rationalize my presence.

For I’m a stranger to all of his instincts.

I’m not another male rhino encroaching on his territory.

Nor am I a female farting winds of estrus.

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JOHN GREY

And I’m certainly no hunter, so unarmed I even write poetry.

Even if I approached him, gun raised, I don’t think he would fear me anyhow.

For nothing is about to shift him from his chosen place in waning afternoon light.

Not even shadows.

Nor the encroaching dark.

He’ll be a shape when everything else is indiscernible, seamless.

He’s like the anchor of a ship I cannot see.

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POETRY

JOHN GREY

ABOUT THAT SHEEP FARMER

There is no place to hide from the heat.

His skin is the colour of baked clay.

Sheep huddle in their usual trance of togetherness.

His hand gestures, his dog’s curbed fury, break up their cozy nothingness, shunt them through the gate, into the lower field.

His voice is rough and loud, expletive-filled.

It’s only for the benefit of livestock.

With his wife, he barely leaves the safety of a grunt.

His children are afraid of him, the eldest afraid of becoming him.

His eye never leaves the shotgun on the wall.

It’s for killing coyotes and conversation.

He was born under the sign of Cancer and the sunspots on his arms will someday take him up on it.

His father was a rancher, likewise his grandfather.

It’s in the blood.

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CAROUSEL CALVO

CAROUSEL CALVO

A FAMILY OUTING

In Mactan, Cebu I spent the day at the beach.

On the way, the highway looked empty of jeepneys.

Ice candy dripped on my lap sugar sweet Milo. High noon. Two tamaraws pulled their load pigs packed in crates alive, maybe drool mixed with feces rubbed their skin raw to iron cables.

The way I remembered it my brother’s hand clung to my wet suit.

A trail of conch shells empty of residents dry starfishes black seaweeds, pruned from the sun.

My pail heavy with the dead, I offered our parched skin to the sea.

We drifted further until waters engulfed our shoulders.

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POETRY

The way I heard it my mother stood frantic at the edge of the shore.

Tikarols reverberated a symphony of wild birds muffled her panic.

We were taken out of water and draped on sturdy shoulders.

A procession greeted our arrival.

The way I heard it my father found us anguish and relief on his face.

I was draped on his sturdy shoulder.

A procession: my mother screamed angry epithets.

I reached for a small hand, salt on my tongue.

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F I C T I O N

CHOOK AN EPIC IN FIVE FLASHES

NICHOLAS XUEREB

I Which elucidates the specifics of our hero’s quandary.

W

aking from a formless slumber, the man on the hospital bed was alarmed to discover he had returned from the operating table without his head. His neck ended in a fleshy scab, and from the top sprouted the nubby tip of his spine. The doctors gathered around his bedside and looked concerned.

“We’ve encountered some unfavourable complications,” explained the surgeon.

FICTION

“To the layman, these procedures may seem routine,” another continued. “But as any good physician knows, accidents happen: one goes in for a little tumour, and what-do-you-know, one finds oneself coming out with the whole head.”

The man might have reacted more strongly to the news were he not dispossessed of the faculties to do so. Regardless, it was all highly confusing. The doctors commended him on his good sportsmanship and informed the man he would be fit to leave the hospital after a single night’s rest.

II In which our hero returns to his wife a changed man.

T

hus he was discharged the following morning into the care of his wife. Before the operation, the man had loved his wife unequivocally and she felt the same of him. Theirs had been a bond of reciprocal dependency; one’s devotions to the other were returned with equal affection. Now the man’s incapacity placed great demands on his wife. Though he was quite capable of washing and dressing himself, he required constant guidance lest he walk into a wall or stub his toe on a piece of furniture. He could not chew his own food, so she had to chew it for him. A catheter-like tube was attached to his oesophagus and protruded from the scab at the top of his neck, into which his wife would spit the pre-chewed mush. He had become an unresponsive and clumsy lover, and sex, like dinner, became unpalatable.

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NICHOLAS XUEREB

And so the time came when she could bear him no longer. She had, after all, loved him most for his mind, and since he no longer possessed one, she could see no reason to stay. A year had passed, and after finding for him a good caretaker, she made the final and painful decision to leave.

III In which the pen does not prove itself mightier than the dollar.

T

he man’s professional life too suffered after the amputation of his head. He had been for some time a moderately successful author of historical novels. Since losing his head, however, he had lost also some of the creative spark that had so energized his early works.

He began to write more slowly, he encountered blocks more often, and of the four or five books that were eventually to see print, it was said they were of inferior quality. Gone were the long, sprawling novels of playful prose and urgent themes. Instead he wrote short, austere works, often centering upon absentminded protagonists, whose abilities to charm were as dulled as that of their author. Critics remarked upon these later works’ “lack of vision”, and the decline of the author’s “moral conscience”. Sales plummeted and within the decade the man had fallen into a poverty he had not known since his youth.

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FICTION

IV In which our hero’s spirit is tested.

N

ow penniless and without his caretaker, the man wandered the earth without aim. He visited many disparate lands; he traversed deserts, climbed mountains, cut through forests; he swam rivers and lakes; he walked by big cities, small towns, countryside, and badlands, yet remained unimpressed. Never did he stay in one place longer than a night, and though his feet bled and his belly was hollow, he continued to wander.

News spread of the man’s remarkable plight, and many speculated as to his motives. Some claimed the man was in search of his lost head, and that it was their duty to guide him in the right direction. Others believed the man to be a transcendent figure, who had grown beyond the need for his head. A third group argued the man’s lost wife was the thing for which he searched, while a fourth claimed that it was neither the head nor the wife that was lost, but the man himself.

A large crowd followed him; some were journalists, others were merely intrigued by the spectacle. A few considered themselves the man’s humble apostles. After many years of travelling he was stopped by a doctor, who asked if he were unwell. Exhausted and incapable of response, the man collapsed into the doctor’s arms.

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NICHOLAS XUEREB

V In which the reader is satisfied.

H

e awoke on a hospital bed, rising from a weightless slumber. As he continued to rise he became aware of a group of doctors in discussion with a priest below him. He felt light, almost tranquil. As he rose further above them, the doctors gathered solemnly by his bedside and looked concerned. “There have been some unfortunate complications,� explained the surgeon.

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LET LIE EMILY PIPERNI

I

met him in a heat wave the summer I turned fourteen. The kind of heat that weighed everything down like gravity. Naturally, it descended on us the same week our pool filter broke and the water turned a weird shade of green.

I was mostly content to stand in the cold air of the freezer, chain-eating Creamsicles until my mom caught me. “That’s it,” she said. “You’re getting out of the house.”

Kate didn’t want to take me to the public pool, but our mom didn’t

FICTION

give either of us much of a choice.

“We’re here for an hour, that’s it,” Kate told me. We stepped out of the changing rooms into the heat and the sun. She made a face and slipped an oversized pair of sunglasses over her eyes. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

At seventeen, and newly licensed, she was highly uninterested in anything to do with me. “Invite a friend,” my mom had said, but mine were at soccer camp, and Kate’s were vacationing, so we were stuck together.

“And don’t think you can get me into that germ-tub,” she pointed to the pool, already crowded with kids lined up by the slides and moms bouncing wailing babies in the shallow end.

“You’ll change your mind,” I warned her. My feet were already burning on the pavement.

“One hour.” She was already turning away, headed for the row of lounge chairs that were set up outside the splash-zone, when her name was called out from the deep end. We both turned toward the voice. I didn’t recognize the guy. Given the look on Kate’s face, I figured she did.

“Matt, hey.” One hand went up to toy with the strap of her bathing suit. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

This, I understood, meant: I would have worn a nicer bikini if I thought I’d see you.

“Well, we don’t have air conditioning,” he said, “and our apartment’s on the fourth floor, so my options were to join a nudist colony or spend a couple days at the pool.”

Kate laughed too hard, and Matt smiled back. Genuine, I thought. It 36

EMILY PIPERNI

reached his eyes. I wondered if he was the first guy to look at Kate that way. I know he was the first one that ever looked at me that way.

“Hey, is this your little sister?”

“Oh.” Kate looked at me. “Yeah. Anna, this is Matt.”

“Hey, Tiger,” he said to me. “I like your towel.”

I glanced down at the bold black and orange pattern. I was young, and I was charmed by the gift of a nickname.

“Thanks,” I said.

“We thought it was a good day for a swim,” Kate added, shooting me a look.

“Couldn’t be a better one,” Matt said. “Hey, you know how to dive?”

“No,” I admitted. He smiled again.

“Well, we’ll have to fix that.”

The heat wave broke before I could master diving, although our lessons continued in my backyard once the water had cleared. I couldn’t quite get the hang of it. I always belly-flopped.

Kate, for all her complaints, never seemed to mind lounging poolside while Matt and I worked on my form and technique. She squealed when my failed attempts splashed her, but was ready with a high-five at any sign of improvement.

“You almost had it that time, Anna!”

Things were different between us with Matt around, and I liked it.

I worried that would change with the seasons, with all of us back at school in the fall and the pool closed up for the winter.

One night while our parents were washing the supper dishes, Kate 37

FICTION

announced: “I have something to ask you. It’s important.”

I looked up from my math homework.

My mom passed my dad a plate and said, “No, you can’t get a tattoo.”

“Actually,” Kate said, “it’s about Matt. He needs a place to stay.”

My dad paused, cloth hovering over the plate as water dripped between them onto the floor.

“Why?” I asked.

Kate glanced at me. “His uncle doesn’t want him anymore and he has no one else.”

“His uncle doesn’t want him anymore,” I repeated. It sounded absurd when I said it.

“I’m sure it’s a bit more complicated than that,” my dad said.

“The apartment is crowded,” Kate said. “And it’s a money issue. I was thinking you could agree to foster him, or something. Just until he turns eighteen.”

My mom shut off the faucet and the room went quiet. “Kate…“ she said.

“It’s not that long!” she argued. “His birthday’s in April, and he’ll work to save up before then.”

“We can’t just take in some kid, Kate,” my dad told her.

“He’s not some kid,” I said. “He’s Matt.”

They all turned to look at me, and I felt my cheeks flush.

“Anna, why don’t you go finish your homework in your room?” my mom said.

My dad put the plate down and handed my mom the dishcloth.

She said, “If you get it done now, you can watch some TV later.”

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EMILY PIPERNI

I gathered my books and left.

All I could hear of the rest of the conversation was muffled voices through the closed door. I sat with my math book open on my bed, straining to make out words from the voices that drifted down the hall.

I could hear my father’s low tones, the ones I recognized from his business calls. My mother occasionally raised her voice loud enough for me to make out, “Just think about it, Kate,” and, “We’re not being fair?”

There was a lull in the conversation. I could smell French toast cooking, though it was long past supper. My dad’s idea of comfort food.

I retreated from the exile of my room to the kitchen, under the pretense of needing a glass of water. The three of them were still gathered around the table, Kate with untouched French toast on a plate. My dad looked up as I walked in, and I made sure to keep my back turned.

“We’re not stupid,” Kate said. “We know things would be different.

But we don’t—” I opened the cabinet for a glass.

“Kate, we’ve been over this,” my mom told her. “The only way we’ll agree to this is if you and Matt aren’t dating.”

“Anna,” my dad said, “have you finished that homework?”

I shook my head and took my glass, chastened from the room.

It was decided that if we were all going to be living together, Kate and Matt had to end their relationship. Kate moved into my room to make space for him. I knew about the rule, my parents’ one stipulation, but I never told them a word about how Kate would sometimes sneak out of 39

FICTION

our room at night.

“Don’t tell,” she’d whisper to me, her voice finding me in the dark.

“It’s okay, alright, Anna? Just don’t tell.”

“Close your eyes,” Matt said from across the room one day.

I looked up from my book. He was looking at Kate, beside him on the loveseat.

She glanced over at the doorway, toward the smell of garlic frying and the sound of my mother’s voice, singing in the kitchen. My father wasn’t home yet.

Kate looked at me.

“It’s okay,” Matt said. “You won’t say anything, will you, Tiger?”

I folded the book over my thumb, saving my place. “Not if you don’t want me to.”

“You’re the best.” He grinned at me in that way that always brought me back to a heat wave, when my feet were burning from standing still.

Warmth flooded my cheeks, dipped low into my belly.

“Okay, close your eyes.”

Kate obeyed, but I watched. He reached beside the couch for a plastic bag he’d hidden there, and pulled the gift out. He held it up to me first, so I could see. A teddy bear, pure white, with a red heart sewn between its hands. I Love You, it said.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.” I tried to close my eyes when she leaned in to kiss him, but I was too late.

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EMILY PIPERNI

“Anna,” he said later that night, catching me in the hallway between the bathroom and my bed.

I was wearing a long T-shirt and I was embarrassed by the color of it, the pattern. Powder blue, faded and spangled. It felt like evidence against my age. Then there was the length of my legs exposed—more than it had when I’d worn it the year before. Although he’d seen plenty of them by the pool all summer.

“Sorry,” I said, “were you waiting for the bathroom?”

“No, I have something for you.” His hands were behind his back, and his mouth turned up with a familiar smile as he brought them forward. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Tiger.”

I took the stuffed animal. Orange, striped black. A tiger. Its nose was shaped like a heart.

“You shouldn’t have,” I told him.

“I wanted to,” he said.

When he leaned in to kiss me I thought I should pull away, but I didn’t. Besides, it was only on the cheek.

Kate was sitting up in bed reading a magazine, and closed it when I came in. “Did I hear Matt out there?” she asked.

I hesitated. “Yeah. Just saying goodnight.”

She nodded, opened her magazine again. I tried to sneak into the room while her attention was elsewhere, but before I could get safely into bed, she’d spotted it.

“What’s that?”

I looked down at the tiger, then up at her, at the teddy bear perched, 41

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watchful, on the nightstand. I Love You. “Nothing.” I said, and stuffed it under my covers.

She sat up, “Where’d you get it?”

“Some guy. I don’t know, it’s not important.” I was lying, but she would never know.

“Wow. Your first Valentine’s gift. I mean besides those cards you get in grade school.” She closed her magazine again, tossed it on the floor and flicked out the light. In the darkness she told me, “I think it’s a big deal.”

It was on one of their sporadic, secret nights that Kate came back crying. I lay there in the dark, listening.

“Kate? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Shut up.” Her voice was thick.

“What happened?”

She was quiet a long time. Eventually I turned away, and I felt the stuffed tiger under the sheets.

“He wouldn’t stop.”

I rolled back to face her. “Matt?”

“I’m not ready, not for that, and I asked him to stop and he wouldn’t.”

I pulled up onto one elbow. “Kate, what—” “I said I’d scream and he—” I got up out of bed. “He let me go but…”

I moved across the room to her.

“You can’t say this to Mom or Dad. He has nowhere else to go.”

“Kate,” I said.

“It’s all done now, I swear.”

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I crawled into her bed, under her covers and she curled into me, her wet cheeks against my collarbone.

“I won’t,” I said.

“You can’t.”

“I know.”

“Two more months,” she whispered.

“We’ll only be gone a few days,” my dad said on his way out the door.

My parents were leaving for the funeral and taking Kate with them.

It was her godmother that had died, so they thought that she should go.

Just a week earlier, Aunt Gina had been on the phone with my mom, complaining of a discomfort in her chest. Like a fullness or a pain that comes and goes. Her doctor said that was the warning sign.

“Just you and me, then,” Matt said.

We were standing in the open doorway, watching them load up the car and wave at us through the windows. It was cold out, and the chill on my skin gave me goosebumps. I rubbed at my arms and returned Matt’s smile.

“Just us.”

“Come on,” he said, rubbing his hands up and down my shoulders to warm them. I was fevered on the inside. “Let’s go in before you get sick.”

Everything felt dark and empty and out of place. The house was silent. I flicked lights on as we went from room to room, but it didn’t change the fact that we were alone.

Now I was the one sitting next to him on the loveseat. I was the one he told: “Close your eyes.” I was the one he kissed. Lips, this time.

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Later, I was the one he came to in the night.

“It’s okay, Tiger,” he told me.

The long T-shirt I wore creased under his fingers, the starry pattern crumpling. It slipped up, giving way to his reach. I would find it days later where it had fallen into the darkness between the wall and the bed frame.

“Don’t be nervous.” His hands were on my chest, so I guess he could feel the uneven rise and fall, the frantic, erratic in and out.

The hard plastic of the tiger’s nose forced against my back. It would leave a heart-shaped dent that I’d run my finger over later, when he’d gone. By the next morning, the mark had faded.

We stood together by the front entrance when they got home.

“Close the door until they get inside,” Matt said, but the cold didn’t bother me.

“How’s my little girl?” my mom asked when she hugged me hello.

She left, I thought. While you were away, she left.

“How was it?” I asked Kate.

“Like a funeral,” she said. “People cried and there were flowers.”

At night, I lay wide awake while Kate slept beside me. I put the tiger under my bed, but I could still feel it there, like it was a part of me.

I remembered the wetness of her tears in the hollow of my neck.

When I sat up she didn’t wake. I left the room unnoticed.

I passed the calendar hanging on the kitchen fridge. One month.

The waiting pages of the year looked endless, hanging there. I ran my 44

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fingers over them, the dates and letters melting into each other, unrecognizable. When they came to an end, I started again.

I felt hot. I moved to the back door, pressing my palm to the glass.

My bare feet felt icy on the tiles.

I looked outside, my forehead to the window, like I could slip through if I pressed hard enough. Spring weather was beginning to thaw the pool water. Something heavy enough could break through, I thought.

I pictured myself diving in, a real dive, breaking the surface to sink into the cold. Going numb.

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RITE JILL TALBOT

D

ear citizens of Victoria, you’ve probably heard some concerns recently about raw sewage in the ocean.

This is the RITE (Respectful, Innovative, Tax-Friendly, Environmental) Plan, previously Stop a Bad Plan, We Need a Better Plan, Stop a Bad Plan, Go with a Good Plan, as well as the original No Plan. You’ve probably wondered when you f lush the toilet, where does it all go? Is my fish in heaven? Will God know I didn’t finish my broccoli? Rest assured, a Victorian toilet

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will flush straight into the ocean—the Georgia Strait, to be particular— and your lost pets, dinners and other leftovers will be free in the sea.

But there are those against this. Why does only the great Victoria have such a plan? Sometimes classic is best. Sharing is caring. Raw is real. So which plan is for you, you are probably wondering. We’ve developed various new sewage options: FU (Flush Undertow), The Better Plan, The Great Plan, God’s Plan, The Great Gatsby, Crap Plan, and Flushing Nemo. All have advantages. Raw is the new treated. Treated is the new Raw. It’s a big ocean, after all. Where will poor Nemo travel, you may wonder. With No Plan perhaps to Seattle, Esquimalt, the Arctic, to China. The world is your oyster. The oyster is your toilet. Your toilet is your friend. Your sewage is your business. Keep it raw. Keep it real.

When in doubt, flush it out. We have a plan, we’re just not sure what it is yet, and that’s as real as it gets. Your heart will go on, or whatever else is flushed. Who knows where Nemo will end up? Vote RITE, and you won’t be disappointed.

Warning: swimming, fishing or breathing are not recommended.

Read directions carefully when ordering a new plan.

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SMALL FIRES GRAEME SHORTEN ADAMS

B

urnt plastic bag on the beach, poisoning someone, I think. I saw it down there in the grey sand, a little earlier, around dawn.

* I was looking at some bad photographs when this started. I admit I’m not qualified to say whether one photo is worse than another but these were bad, black-and-silver-gel sort of things of bare torsos over sheets, you know, I think we’d seen it all before. A kind of perfect clasped

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cleverness like an armadillo. I didn’t like it. The world feels too frayed for a wink and finesse. * A fire ritual, and somebody behind me, I think that was where it began, me maybe in the inner ring of a series of rings stretching from the slate surface of the Precambrian shield to the Astroturf of a baseball stadium that I stood on as a choirboy, legs cold in the dress pants, staring into the rack of lights. I am out of work now and confined, too, to swollen gel. * The photographs were in a catalogue that was on the desk when I got in and the pages were glossy like they were important. There was nothing important about any of it and that nearly broke my heart—that the photographer believed in the gloss of the catalogue.

I was two people in addition to my self folded into the pants. First was Mirabai, I inhabited this person Mirabai. Second was a name that has since been replaced by a drawing of a seagull. It was done by an autistic girl and as I understand it, it is more common to have autistic boys, autistic boys are common but not autistic girls, I’ve been told. It’s a pretty naturalistic seagull but there is something skewed about it, it’s almost certainly a drawing from a photograph. Also the bird’s head is strange, sort of slanted on its body and looking at you when you look at it. On the bottom part of the drawing there’s this dedication, a man’s name, but I forgot the name and can only see the seagull now when I try to remember it. I was Mirabai and I was the drawing of the seagull. * 50

GRAEME SHORTEN ADAMS

I was a security guard. I worked at night and slept during the day. I no longer have this job. Prior to being a security guard I was a tour guide at a harbour and prior to that I was a camp counselor and I studied psychology. The building caught fire. I think fire was a primal danger when people like me were around, sort of projecting our thoughts into the space like the shadows of dark wings, I think fire was an outcome of our pairing. A chemical, a chemically-induced fire, I want to say. The fire caught the building. * Mirabai is grand, was ten, is thirty-one, was taking the bus to another bus when this occurred: she accidentally remembered that she hadn’t known what to say at a staff social they held about three weeks before I was at the security desk looking at the bad photographs. She sat at desks around town to represent a charity called Last Candle that works with terminally ill low-income individuals who cannot afford palliative care. She isn’t doing this anymore, now it’s about a trip, some sort of big trip (you know the kind: rejuvenation among the tanned poor) that hasn’t happened yet but at that point the lens of her life was on being at the desks and not talking very much, thankfully, because mostly she had to type.

Mirabai, white as flour, not exactly named after the Hindu poet but more named after the idea of being named after her, as hippie parents like that (mine are firm and old and stubborn and seem eternal, like they’ll never die) are wont to do—right down to adding a suffix, implying familiarity. Her parents might even have a book of Meera’s poems.

My parents are the stone face of the world that I flutter over.

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* There is a lot of poison in my blood now because I’ve been living in the projections of the construction that they’re doing for a new wing of the university where I was working as a security guard, and the green-ness and blue-ness of the lines, overlapping one another, makes me sicken. I do want to admit that the fire was arson and in fact I know exactly who did it, right down to the details of their, of their sorts of smeared faces: Two males, the first I would say five foot six, long face like a dead fish but with that brutal carving from the cheekbones down to the square but nubby jaw. Child-burning-the-wings-of-birds handsome is the type. Grey hoodie nondescript but I know the brand, it’s something I would have worn at that age, which is eighteen.

Second male rangier, beginnings of a beard, in red pants with white stripes. That was a seed of a mistake which of course remained unflowered because I never, I never did do what I was supposed to. Had I done that and acted and called the police and the fire people then the pants would have been an error since they’re too bright on the camera. * Mirabai puts her hand on the photocopier and creates various ghost clones. I like where the ink sort of warps and fades and bends on the page so they look almost like decibel meters. She takes what she was supposed to be photocopying and photocopies it and brings it back through the side hall with the fluorescent panel lighting and gravel-coloured wainscoting to the table with the purple cloth (the purple of Last Candle, a sort of dark wine-grape sort of murkiness) and the laptops with the buzzing white screens. The guy is still there rubbing 52

GRAEME SHORTEN ADAMS

his chin with his palm and smiling with his top row of teeth. So what do you do here exactly Mirabai, he says. She shifts in the seat and looks up at him politely. I’m one of the External Coordinators for this branch, she says and she explains what that means but of course she sees it wash over him like a wave over dumb stone. He won’t leave. At some point he’ll make a joke and laugh at it and reach out and touch her shoulder like hey, what a joke! And she’ll just be sitting here because she can’t leave, she used up the photocopier excuse and she has to be at the table for next one hundred years. * I was at the security desk inside a sort of glass cage which is where I would arrive most nights or days. I preferred nights, certainly (less to see and do). And the night of the bad photographs was a night. Now I had laid down the book and looked at the drawing of the seagull thinking of the seagull’s crooked head cast over the world as it flew across the seas. The judging eye of the skewed head and the tiny knuckles of my co-worker’s daughter drawing this seagull invested with the weight of a thousand legal precedents or labourers drained of blood at the foot of a ziggurat. I stared and stared and became the lines, became the black crayon on the yellow construction paper and the construction paper too, I became the bright pins that held the drawing in place on the corkboard with pictures of our families. Was this my family, my daughter, my ancestor in the sardonic seagull, my name in the dedication or the name of my co-worker? Was all this shared between us, we who knew the insides of this glass cage protecting the school from what it didn’t even know it was threatened by? Were we heroes? Every 53

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moment when I stepped into the glass cage, was I a hero? It was 3:30 in the morning. * Then I saw the kids arrive on one of the cams. Red pants caught my eye.

At the staff social, Mirabai was thinking about a woman she had visited who was dying of leukemia. She visited her in the cool dark of her apartment where the woman’s older sister was nodding concernedly at Dana and I from an alcove by the fridge plastered with magnets. This sister had taken care of this woman for a long time, the woman with leukemia was autistic, she spoke to them a little, she was even friendly.

It was one of the first “field trips” Mirabai made with Last Candle; most of the time she would stay in the office and type and that was her insertion into the world, her projection. But this time she was there and tasted the thinness of the air conditioning. And while everyone on staff was talking about their preferred places to drink in Europe, she realized she was incredibly stuck, fixed in ragged drippings to the ground, with only her head burning. * From this realization comes Mirabai seeing me from the bus, in my cage, watching the two boys get in through the parking lot. Then they are in the stairwell and they get to the room where somehow, among the tubes and pipes, the thing they set up allows the fire to happen, the chemicals do their amoral business and somehow the heat is eventually enough to blow the door off its hinges and have the flames, like movie flames, spewing out the windows. And I watch the two boys scurry out of there and down the street, into the dark outside of the cameras.

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GRAEME SHORTEN ADAMS

* When I was a boy I was once approached by seagulls. I had some French fries and they wanted them. We were outside the baseball stadium and Dad bought me fries and then turned away a moment, just one moment and they saw me. They had grown fearless from living around the people milling around the stadium and I was in the cold dress pants flapping over my skinny legs, fresh from a field trip to sing the national anthem in the centre of the stadium with the lights blazing. They saw me and lifted their grey wings. * I froze, I was tense and inactive. Now I was lax and inactive; at any point I could have sounded the alarm on the boys, alerted them to my watchful eye that flickered through every story of the building, permeating the place, making it blink, but no—this time I wanted the threshold crossed and I don’t know whether I can tell you the because of it. The because of the hand lifted from the crime on the world made silver and gelatinous. * I understood what they understood about fire. It’s just motion, just action, just a becoming you can see. It was my fault, fire was the shadow I had spread over the building three months into the job, dark and heavy fire, flicking over the surface of the polished floors like a bird’s silhouette, me the bird dragging itself across eras and battered by dark winds over the flat heavy sea that stretches for miles without encircling itself. Seeing the garbage people have thrown on the beaches and bays: cans and plastic bags thrown in the fire, weakly turning into 55

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poison. The poison of plans and material. * Mirabai, she and I, ten years old and very cold. It was very cold in the stadium on the false grass singing the song of the nation. And cold grey and fries after. She becomes what I un-become as I drag my flimsy wings over her.

56

AT THE CORE OF IT MIKAILA HANMAN SIEGERSMA

P

aulo looks into the end of the spout as the last trickle of clear liquid joins the pool of moonshine in the bucket. He closes off the spout with the lever and his mouth broadens into a smile.

Jumping up from his squatting position, he knocks over a pot of thick, red paint.

“Fuck it cunt fuck bucket.”

He dances out the way of the paint as it begins to flow across the floor. He grabs the pot and puts it on the bench, among jars of graphite

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pencils and paintbrushes, sketches done this morning, assorted pastels out of their box and an apple core from last week. Pulling a chair up to the cupboard, he opens the door and gropes at the back for a box filled with old towels. His hand meets something fleecy and soft, and he pushes it aside, continuing to rummage, watching the puddle of paint travel further over the floorboards.

“Fuck fuck fuck.” Magazine cutouts and pages of books fall to the ground as he fights with the cupboard for something to clean up the paint. Finally his fingers touch an old towel and, stepping down from the chair, he throws it at the paint. It lands a metre away. He huffs and picks it up, spreading it out by its four corners and laying it down on the spreading puddle. It leaks out of the towel.

“Ange, have you got a minute? I spilt some paint,” he says down the corridor.

He hears her footsteps in the kitchen, her muffled voice. She walks to the other end of the house. The laundry door opens, then closes, a plastic bottle falls and is picked up. The tap is turned on, house singing, vibrating with the hot water system. He kneels down and pats the paint with the scraggly towel.

Angie appears at the doorway, holding a mop bucket in one hand and a bottle of mineral turpentine in the other. She’s on the phone, with her head craned over to the side and her shoulder raised. She sniffs, watching him. “Do you mind if I call you back? Paulo just had a spill.”

Paulo takes one look at her and rises, grabbing his sketchbook from the bench. He mimes to Angie to stay where she is. She is positioned perfectly in the doorframe, the mop, bucket and bottle of turps 58

MIKAILA HANMAN SIEGERSMA

creating a composition that catches the light streaming in through the window. Rolling her eyes, Angie stays while Paulo gets her brief outline on paper. His hand moves quickly with rough strokes. He could be playing an instrument, thinks Angie as she watches his hand fly and dart, his rhythm changing as he glances from her to the page, from the page to her. His eyes narrow as he looks at the sketch and then broaden and deepen when he looks at her, his head tilting as he compares reality to the drawing.

After ten minutes standing for him, she puts the mop bucket down.

“You finished?”

“No. Wait.”

She picks the bucket up again. He adds a couple of lines and then looks at the sketch. “Yep, you can move now. Thanks.” He takes the bucket out of her hand and gets the mop from the corner of the room.

“Use this towel.” Angie hands him a fresh towel that she brought from the other end of the house. “So it doesn’t ruin the mop.”

“Good thinking.” Paulo throws the other towel that’s soaked up with paint to the corner of the room. He puts the new one on the paint spill and looks at Angie, still in the doorframe. “Who was that?”

Angie shifts and leans into the frame, putting her hand on her hip.

“Eve.” “Everything okay?”

“Nothing to worry about.” Angie walks into the room, her eyes on his new painting. ‘The colours in this are so…. warm. It’s got great movement.”

“It’s the world of my inner child.” Paulo splashes some turps on 59

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the place where the paint was spilt. Most of it is gone, but a blood red smudge remains on the floorboards.

“How old?”

“No age specifically.”

“No, I mean, how long ago did you paint it? I didn’t see it two weeks ago when I was in here.”

“I did it last night.”

She touches the fabric of the canvas, stroking the contours in between the thick lines of paint. ‘They’re like little valleys and mountains.”

“I don’t think it’s finished.”

“How do you know when something is finished?” Angie says, her eyes wandering over to him.

He shrugs. “When it feels a certain way.”

“Like butterflies or something?”

“No, more like feeling full, like you’ve eaten a three course meal.”

Paulo finishes mopping and opens the door to the garden. It is very bright outside. He tips the contents of the mop bucket onto the grass.

Angie can see the lemon tree from where she stands, the tomato plants next to it. She looks back at Paulo, shaking the last of the liquid out. “Wait, is that mineral turpentine that you’re tipping out into the garden?” She walks towards him, her voice rising.

“Yeah… Oh shit!” He looks down at the wet patch on the grass.

“Paulo.” She grabs the mop bucket from him. “Go and get the hose and try to dilute it a bit so it doesn’t completely fuck the soil.”

He looks like a puppy that’s been scolded, picking up the hose from the ground and then running around the corner to turn the tap on.

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Angie hears someone knocking on the front door. She walks through the hallway and opens it. Sun streaks through and she covers her eyes with her arm. Rachel, her friend from high school, stands on the front step. Angie holds her in a tight embrace, kissing her on both cheeks.

In the kitchen they sit on red vintage lino chairs that Paulo picked up from the rubbish last week. They make a little exhaling noise as Rachel sits down in hers. She wears her hair in a tight, high ponytail.

Her cheeks shine and her arms, strong and brown, smell of coconut oil.

When she smiles, which is often, it’s a forced tight smile, like both sides of her mouth are being pulled by hooks and elastic bands. Her mouth shows two rows of perfect teeth. Angie wonders whether Rachel’s had braces since leaving school, because she remembers her teeth being crooked. She decides not to ask about it. Her friend says she has just come from yoga.

“What studio do you go to?” Angie says, her back to her, filling the kettle with water.

“Bikram, on Bridge Street.” She leans down to her bag, retrieving a bright pink exercise jacket. It says Adidas in turquoise stitching above the left breast. She zips it up, quick and sudden, and in the kitchen it sounds obtrusive. She tells Angie that Bikram is the most beneficial of the yogas to do. The high production of sweat and the hot temperature cleanses the body of all its toxins. Angie asks her what flavour of tea she would like. Her friend would like a chai tea, if she’s got it.

Angie turns to her. “How hot is the room?”

“Forty.”

“That’s hot.”

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Her friend laughs. Says that it is great for stretching. That it helps the body to be more flexible. “You can get right into it,” she says. She turns her body in the chair, to the right and then to the left, cracking her back.

She tells Angie she should come along one day.

“Are you teaching?”

“Only four classes a week.”

“I’m not exactly your athletic Baywatch sweetheart.”

“It’s not about being good at it.”

“Last time I went to the gym was…” Angie chuckles. The kettle whistles on the stove and she turns the gas off. She sighs, looks at the teacups, then out to the garden. She can feel her friend looking at her.

“I’d go easy on you,” Rachel says.

She looks around. “You won’t have to go easy on me,” she says.

“Next Thursday then?” Her friend’s head is cocked and her mouth is half-smiling.

Angie laughs again, nervous.

“Ten?” Angie agrees. She pushes both of the sleeves up on her grey jumper.

There are holes on the elbows and armpits. The stitching is coming undone on the shoulder. It is her favourite because of this. She grabs the kettle off the stove and pours the steaming water into the two mugs.

Handing one to her friend, she sits back down at the table opposite her.

Her friend puts her hands around the mug.

“How long did it take?” Angie says.

“What?”

“To become a hot yoga instructor.”

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They both snort into their cups.

“I was in India for three years. Studying under Yuishma Bhahatnavida.”

“Try and say that twenty times.”

“And then try it backwards.”

They both attempt it.

Her friend asks about Paulo. Angie swivels in her chair to make sure the kitchen door is closed.

“He’s been so consumed with his work,” she says. “Last night he forgot about a dinner that we had planned to go to.”

“Whose dinner?”

“Eve’s. She’s just decided to go vegetarian. She cooked for us.”

“Trying to kick another vice?”

“Only playing with the idea of it.”

Eve, Angie and Rachel used to live together in a house with walls that were stained with Blu-tack marks from Joni Mitchell posters and Rimbaud poems, a front door step that was rotten and caving in, and a sagging couch which was the temporary home for lost musicians.

“Is he selling much?”

“Bits here and there.” Angie looks out the window, avoids her friend’s gaze.

“They say being an artist is one of the hardest occupations these days,” Rachel says. “Because of the competition.”

Angie doesn’t reply for a while. She sighs and looks back at her friend who has the edges of her lips pursed and her brows creased. “It’s only hard because they make it so. No one told them they had to suffer.” She 63

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clears her throat. “Tell me about India.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “Should I go?”

“Of course,” her friend says. “It helps you look at yourself in a different way. Some could say it’s—” she puts both hands across her heart, sits up straight and closes her eyes “—life changing.” On life changing she looks at Angie and batts her eyelids.

Angie punches her on the shoulder affectionately.

Her friend goes on. “They serve chai on the street—” and she cups her hands together “—in these handmade clay mugs. Once you’ve finished drinking it, you smash it on the ground and everyone claps and smiles.”

Angie holds up her cup. “I bet this stuff is shit compared to what you had over there.”

She shakes her head and pauses. “It’s different. Xan and I were on a train, about to leave Rishikesh, and this boy, probably about ten, taps on the window and we open it and he passes through two steaming chais and we put money into his palm and sat there sipping and smiling until the train hooted and he moved out of the way so we could smash the cups out the window.

“Woah,” she says and smiles.

“I know.”

At this, both women sink a little into their chairs. They hear Paulo singing loudly to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” from his studio and Angie sees the cat stalk across the window frame outside.

The cat licks herself, then turns her head and looks at them, that keen feline inquisition. Angie wonders what it thinks of them.

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“What about the sounds in India?”

“So crazy. Like a symphony. A street symphony. Hooves of cows clumping past, electric clippers from open-windowed barbers buzzing, motorbikes weaving through traffic with coughing engines.” Rachel’s voice trails off. She looks back at Angie. “Seriously, it’s amazing.”

Angie chuckles. “Sounds much better than Dylan.” * Angie calls Paulo’s phone from the kitchen. Her friend has gone, told her she would see her at Bikram. The phone rings out. She dials it again. She hears his footsteps coming down the hallway.

“How was…?” Paulo pokes his head around the kitchen door. He reaches both his arms up and holds onto the frame of the door with his hands. His feet are bare feet and his jeans are loose around his waist.

Superman boxer shorts poke out the top of them. Jumping up on the bench, he shoves his hands deep into his pockets. They reappear with his pouch of tobacco, filters and papers. He puts a filter between his lips and a cigarette paper between his thumb and pointer finger.

“Rachel,” Angie says.

“Right, Rachel.”

“She’s well.” Angie gets up and puts the used mugs in the sink. She opens the window and leans out of it, her eyes closed to the sunlight.

“Still with Xan?” “Yeah, they just came back from India.”

He lights his cigarette and jumps down from the bench. “I’m gonna go ride to Michael’s. We’re building a huge puppet of Tony Abbot with a cock on his head. For the march on Sunday. Come and see it later if 65

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you’ve got some time before your class.” He pulls his Blundstones on and walks around the table. He touches her on the hip.

“I don’t know if I’ll have time to come and see the cockhead, ” she says. “I’ve got so much homework. ” His hand reaches for her neck. “You know, we’re making an attachment to the cock so you can protract and detract it.”

“How tasteful.”

He kisses her behind the ear, then cheek, then mouth, his hand sliding down to the small of her back. She holds the nape of his neck.

“What was that phrase in Spanish that you were practising last night?” Paulo says, pulling his head away from her to look at her face. A strand of her hair is tucked behind his ear.

“A lo hecho, pecho.”

Paulo repeats it. Slowly. With deliberate mouth movements that make him look like he’s speaking underwater. Angie imagines his hair swaying seaweed, his limbs light and buoyant, a fleshy prize for the deep blue abyss.

“What does it mean again?” he says.

“Don’t cry over spilt milk.”

A big grin spreads over his crooked teeth. “I never do. Actually, only when I drop the last bottle. Then it’s super annoying.” He squeezes her arse and gives it a gentle tap. “Alright, well, I’ll see ya later. ” He takes a couple of steps toward the door, opens the flywire, then turns back mid stride. “Good luck with Spanish class.”

“Gracias, señor.”

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MIKAILA HANMAN SIEGERSMA

Angie lays on her back on the mattress on the floor, the ceiling above melting and sliding, congruous to the deep breathe of her rising and falling stomach. The dusk sun is warming the mauve painted walls of the bedroom. A womb.

Opposite the bed is one of Paulo’s earliest paintings. It is of her naked and reclining, breasts hanging. Her curves sink into each other; her hips are full half moons of flesh. Angie admires her figure, her long legs extending out of the frame. She touches her own legs. The hairs are prickly and purple varicose veins stick out. They wind and weave underneath her skin, the translucency of her flesh ugly and saggy.

On the back of her knee, she pinches a bit of skin with her finger and thumb, pulling it as far away from her body as she can. She gets up and inspects her breasts in the painting, stroking the canvas. Taking off her grey jumper and her bra, she compares reality to the art. In the mirror she turns sideways to see her figure. Her breasts are more slumped now.

She feels a bone-deep longing to have her young body back. Just those breasts, at the very least.

The present drifts and wanders. The cat pushes the door ajar with its tail. It slides along the wall to the mirror and then looks up at Angie’s reflection in the mirror. It meows. Angie squats down and scratches the cat behind the ears. A purring comes from the bowls of its mouth into the whirring of its whiskers.

Angie looks at herself in the mirror again, pulling her hair up into a bun, turning her head to the left, to the right. She finds three grey hairs; they’ve sidled in there without her knowing. Running her fingers along the grey hairs, she notices that her cheekbones remain her best feature.

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FICTION

Paulo still kisses right along them, from where her nose ends to where her cheeks join with her hairline. As if they are a mountain ridge, or the edge of a cliff. And her sunken cheeks a lagoon that he must fall into before he reaches her lips.

The cat continues to look at her and she stares down at it, wondering whether it can read her face.

She lets her hair fall and gathers her things for Spanish class. Turning the lights off in the kitchen, she notices a note that Paulo must have left.

It is beside a plate with a crust of bread on it. They are Pablo Picasso’s words.

Love is the greatest refreshment of life.

She puts the note in the back pocket of her jeans and closes the door.

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CONTRIBUTORS TESS LIEM was born and raised in Alberta and then raised some more in Ontario, where she earned a B.A. in Linguistics and English Literature at the University of Toronto. She is currently studying Music at Concordia and was the artist-in-residence of the Fine Arts Reading Room for November 2014. When she isn’t playing piano, reading, or writing, she is eating and sometimes sleeping.

HOLLY DAY lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she teaches writing classes at the Loft Literary Center. Her published books include the nonfiction books Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, and Piano All-inOne for Dummies, and the poetry books Late-Night Reading for Hardworking Construction Men (The Moon Publishing) and The Smell of Snow (ELJ Publications).

ALEX ROBICHAUD is an artist living in Montreal. She mostly makes photographs, sometimes drawings, and other times poems. “Facts of Life” is one of her poems. She hopes you like it.

SIMON BANDEROB is an actor, storyteller and writer from Peterborough, Ontario. He is first and last a spoken-word poet who has competed and performed at poetry slams and festivals in Montreal, Peterborough, Toronto and Victoria, as well as in Germany. Simon represented Montreal at the 2013 Canadian Festival of the Spoken Word as part of the Throw! Collective’s team. He studies Theatre and Development as well as Political Science at Concordia University.

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CONTRIBUTORS SASHA TATE–HOWARTH is currently in her third year, studying Creative Writing and English Literature at Concordia. Sasha grew up in Toronto, and self-published several zines throughout high school, before attending University of Toronto for a year, where she was the recipient of the Ted Chamberlain and Norma Goodison Award for Poetry. Her work currently deals with themes of place, displacement, distance, transience, and small transformations.

RONAN NANNING–WATSON is a filmmaker, writer and artist from British Columbia. His work ranges in scope, medium, and aesthetic, but is consistently uncompromising. Recently he finished his first feature film, Crusade, about a bloody/apathetic hipster cult/holy war, and is in preproduction on the next two in the trilogy.

TARA McGOWAN–ROSS is basically the coolest person ever. She is a writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist, which is pretty awesome.

She is currently studying philosophy, because she is super smart and interesting. You should buy her a beer.

MIA POIRIER is a Toronto-born person, currently completing their degree in English and Creative Writing. When she’s not writing poems, she can be found buying cans of Diet Coke at Dollarama, and/or trying on sweaters. She lives with three cats and enjoys season two of Pokémon.

This is her first publication.

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CONTRIBUTORS KRISTAL KORDICH–CRANDALL was born in Victoria, B.C. She is currently a fourth-year undergraduate student in Creative Writing and Studio Arts at Concordia. Her work is often concerned with issues of both interpersonal and self-perception, as well as its connection to the sound and movement of language.

JOHN GREY is an Australian-born poet, playwright, musician, and Providence, Rhode Island resident since the late seventies. He has been published in numerous magazines including Weird Tales, Christian Science Monitor, Greensboro Poetry Review, Poem, Agni, Poet Lore and Journal Of The American Medical Association, as well as the horror anthology What Fears Become and the science fiction anthology Futuredaze. He has had plays produced in Los Angeles and off-off Broadway in New York.

CAROUSEL CALVO is completing her MA in English and Creative Writing at Concordia University. She tends to roam, looking for a place to settle down. She hasn’t found it yet. She’s a transient, not by choice at first, but she has learned to embrace her dissatisfactions, hence, the wanderlust.

NICHOLAS XUEREB was born and raised in Williamstown, a suburb of Melbourne. Now 20, he is studying for a BA in Creative Writing at RMIT University, currently on exchange at Concordia. Likes: dogs, books. Dislikes: liquorice, spiders. Allergies: walnut, pistachio, pecan, etc.

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CONTRIBUTORS EMILY PIPERNI is currently studying English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. She lives on the South Shore of Montreal, where she is able to practice her second passion of smallscale animal hoarding. “Let Lie” is her first publication.

JILL TALBOT was born in Vancouver, where she attended Simon Fraser University for Psychology. Since then, Jill has pursued her passion for writing, winning third place for the Aspiring Canadian Poets contest, runner up for the Little Bird Anthology short story contest and first place in the Passion Poetry contest. She lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. Her story “RITE” was selected as the winner of our Fall 2014 Flash Fiction Contest.

GRAEME SHORTEN ADAMS is a Studio Arts major at Concordia.

He was born in Toronto. He’s currently the copy editor at The Link Newspaper and served as its graphics editor in 2013. This is the first time one of his stories has been published. He’s currently working on a small collection of comics.

MIKAILA HANMAN SIEGERSMA is a Creative Writing student at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Her past publications include various issues of Gore (2013, 2014) Volta, Sticky Institute’s Festival of the Photocopier 2014 exhibition and Mary (2014).

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Literature Undergrads’ Colloquium at Concordia 2015 Conference and Publication: March 20th 2015 Call for papers: January 2015 For submission details, visit caseconcordia.ca

S O L I L O Q U I E S A N T H O L O G Y 1 9 .

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$5 CAD

ISBN 978-1-77185-370-5 PRINTED AND BOUND IN MONTREAL