Soliloquies Anthology 20.2

Soliloquies Antholog y I I I 20.2

Soliloquies Anthology 20.2

Copyright Š 2016 Soliloquies Anthology Soliloquies Anthology retains first North American Serial Rights.

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 publisher.

ISSN 1496-4910 (print) ISSN 2369-601X (online) Manufactured in Canada Printed and bound by CaĂŻus du Livre Design and layout by Maxwell Addington Soliloquies Anthology, c/o Concordia University Department of English 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West Montreal, Quebec H3G 1M8 soliloquies.ca

Editorial Committee Editor-in-Chief Kailey Havelock Artistic Director Maxwell Addington Managing Editor Daniel Macaulay Poetry Editors Simon Banderob Meredith Marty-Dugas Maya Popovich Fiction Editor Mike D’Itri Guest Fiction Editor Carlos Fuentes Media Editors Alex Custodio Travis Wall Copy Editors Simon Banderob, Alex Custodio, Kailey Havelock, Daniel Macaulay, Maya Popvich

Contents Foreword 7 Poetry 19 Annah-Lauren Bloom 12 Rules for Recollections Scott Bryson 14 A Storm is Coming Marc Carver 15 Perth Weather Michael Farry 16 tuesday aubade Karissa LaRocque 17 Minor Adjustments Sarah Lonelodge 19 The third panel: black rain Ilona Martonfi 20 For Gatien Lapointe Michael Mingo 22 Four Months Later Sarah Mudrosky 23 While You Are Away Sarah Mudrosky 24 The Backseat of Your Car Esmé Pine 25 Wind Shift Yvette Schnoeker–Shorb 26 Jocelyn Sabrina White 27

Fiction Just Toss Me a Bone, Woman! Rachel Laverdiere 31 Everything Must Go Brittany Smith 41 Don’t Upset the World’s Best Second-Rate Writer Anne Weisgerber 51 Non-Fiction Terroir Darina Blaszczyk 63 The Gulf Devi Yesodharan 75 Flash Fiction For the Walk Home Julia Scandella 85 Contributors 87

Foreword I I I Kailey Havelock

I

can’t say for certain, but I think the first issue of Soliloquies Anthology I acquired was from a Concordia Open House event, or maybe a beginningof-the-year social gathering in the department. It was right at the start of my degree, a back issue, though by now I have copies of most issues so I’m not sure which it was. My point is that Soliloquies Anthology has been there since the beginning of my undergraduate career, and was around for a long while before that. Since 1997, this anthology has been a venue for students beginning their careers as publishers, editors, and writers.

Through online initiatives like our Soliloquies Writes articles and Flash Fiction contests, and in person at our publication launches and Soliloquies Reads events, Soliloquies Anthology has been a part of a literary community that reaches from Concordia’s library to around the world.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Soliloquies Anthology, I have had the opportunity to spend the past year working with a committee of ten editors on campus, and with

Foreword

writers everywhere. We have produced two beautiful publications to celebrate our twentieth edition year, and have revisited an incredible legacy of talented contributors. The opportunity to spend the year working within this vast literary community has been truly humbling. I am in awe of how much this anthology has grown in its readership and volumes of contributors, since starting out as a staple-bound publication featuring primarily Concordia students, and I am eager to see what the coming years will bring.

Soliloquies Anthology 20.2 reflects several months of hard work on the part of our editors and writers, and nearly two decades of our readership’s enjoyment of good writing. In poetry and prose, the writers in this issue delicately craft fleeting moments of lives that bring readers intimately close to a sense of realness and a recognition of life in art, through stunning renderings of person, image, blinks of time that captivate and linger off the page. These writers explore the complexities of identity, placeness, and life as lived, offering distinct perspectives unified by a preoccupation with the ephemerality and eternality of the moments that perplex and engage all of us—as people and as readers.

Thank you to our poets Annah-Lauren Bloom, Scott Bryson, Marc Carver, Michael Farry, Karissa LaRocque, Sarah Lonelodge, Ilona Martonfi, Michael Mingo, Sarah Mudrosky, Esmé Pine, Yvette SchnoekerShorb, and Sabrina White. Thank you to our fiction and creative non-fiction writers Rachel Laverdiere, Brit8

Kailey Havelock

tany Smith, Anne Weisgerber, Darina Blaszczyk, and Devi Yesodharan, as well as our Flash Fiction Contest winner Julia Scandella. Without our writers, the pages of this anthology would be empty, so I am grateful for their dedication to writing and generosity in contributing to Soliloquies Anthology.

So many people have been a part of the printing of this anthology. I am endlessly grateful for the financial support of the Concordia Association for Students in English and the Arts and Sciences Federation of Associations, as well the Concordia Council for Student Life’s contributions to the Soliloquies Reads series. Thank you to the Department of English for being such an inspiring place in which to produce a publication, surrounded by talented faculty and students.

I would like to offer congratulations to the Editorial Committee, without whom this publication would never have made it to print. Lots of love to the extraordinarily patient and dedicated editors who respond to publication-related emergencies at all hours of the night. And great thanks to Colleen Romaniuk and Rachel Rosenberg, two Editors-in-Chief who preceded me, for providing so much guidance and support when I took on this role a year ago—I feel so honoured to have had the opportunity to follow in their footsteps.

In writing this foreword, I was cautioned not to overuse the word “thanks,” since it can become rather repetitive. Maybe that’s true, but I see no way around it when there are so many people who have contributed to 9

Foreword the production of this publication, and countless more whom I won’t have opportunity to credit within these few pages. I am thankful for the people I have worked with on the twentieth edition of Soliloquies Anthology.

And thank you, reader, for taking the time to read this foreword and for indulging my sentimentality. You hold in your hands a publication written by a truly special literary community, and I hope you enjoy each page as much as I do.

Kailey Havelock, Editor-in-Chief

10

Poetry

Annah-Lauren Bloom

19 I have many places to be but most days all I want to do is sit in my kitchen where the light is pale and suck down coffee forever.

Though I hate the taste some days and some days I don’t, I want to sit in my kitchen and wait for Sadie to get home forever, and watch Phoebe chop onions forever, and talk then be quiet.

I could be happy staying here, people circulating in and out.

I’d watch the light change each day, notice how the microwave glints near the end.

I’d notice things.

Each time I walk by the park at night I recall a feeling I had lost.

The air hits my face the way it did, and I think back

12

to so many nights in the cold grass, praying to get kissed, praying to find something somewhere.

In the park the light spills the same, dim orange across the blue.

Playing dead in the grass beneath the pale purple sky, watching bats fly overhead.

13

Scott Bryson

Rules for Recollections I find I’m using the Oxford comma more often as time passes— as a safety measure.

Not just for lists (I have semicolons for that), but for recollected moments too: a screen door with no hinges, the back of a deserted house, and a distant billboard that has something to do with departure.

I’ve convinced myself that it eliminates misunderstandings.

14

Marc Carver

A Storm is Coming The birds run past my window low to the ground the fastest I have ever seen them go.

Hundreds of them flee as if in mortal danger, then I remember the storm, the storm from the west is coming.

I saw it on the TV but the birds don’t watch the TV. How could they possibly know?

15

Michael Farry

Perth Weather Among the shorts and sandals he stood out—unconvinced, secure raincoat on his arm.

Facing what he thought was west he noted cloud formations, wind direction and forecast soft showers, cool breezes, got it all wrong, sweltered in outrageous gear.

He tried to learn this climate, trust down-under weather, boasted of becoming an expert once again, in foreign shades.

But when the Indian Ocean storm sneaked in and drenched him on Cappuccino Strip, Fremantle, he jettisoned his learning, his useless, hard-won wisdom, accepted what the wind blew in.

16

Karissa LaRocque

tuesday aubade I heard the sunday bells as you circled me tuesday morning with my chin under the covers you don’t hear me ask “wedding, or funeral?”

It’s so early I wonder if last night’s glitter is still on your hands if a sparkle could get stuck in my urinary tract I remember I left my cranberry pills at their house in New Brunswick that morning all three of us had pancakes I think about the kind she likes how her girlfriend makes them so small the size of a pog the diameter of a cookie dough cylinder the circumference of a President’s Choice wheat cracker

17

I remember that I spilled maple syrup over my knees and waited for the dog to lick it off I untuck my face from under the covers and move your hand to sit up without my glasses on I mistake the brick wall outside your window for the dark sky before a storm

18

Sarah Lonelodge

Minor Adjustments I am his, he reminds me.

His wooden doll, painted up and dressed just so.

Stand there and look pretty, he says.

“Sure, dear.”

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

So he cuts off little pieces of me here and there, sandpapers me until my arms bleed.

Minor adjustments, he says.

We wouldn’t do this if you’d just Not say that Not think this Not do that “Of course, darling.”

He burns the slivers to dust before they hit the floor so they won’t accidentally reattach themselves.

He talks so long that I forget what they were.

“Yes, I understand.”

I am made of wood but, without noticing, I’ve become a stick that he snaps and splinters.

19

Ilona Martonfi

The third panel: black rain (Kamishibai—paper theatre, picture scrolls storytelling—is conducted as part of an ongoing campaign to promote world peace. Yuudai Kimura created a kamishibai based on the story of his mother, Umeko, who died in Nagasaki.)

Black rain falling clay roof tiles pumpkin fields rice paddies the city became dark bullfrogs, fireflies at 11: 02 A.M. August 9, 1945 silence, no wind.

Holes where eyes had been his mother Umeko would not need her kimono anymore covered in bandages flies and maggots

20

crawling on her body.

Island of Kyushu Mount Inasa a boy carrying a box with five cicadas.

21

Michael Mingo

For Gatien Lapointe Sap on the webbed skin that separates my fingers, pine needles sticking: a sweet itch, spread like a rich glaze, baking in sun rays, in friction.

Everything I touch— mosses, ivies, twigs— folds within my hands, crusts like bark, and leaves traces of past life.

Your wood pulp etchings claimed a forest sprouted from your outstretched arms, and you rejoiced, but just how ecstatic, Gatien, is returning to loam at nature’s threshold?

22

Sarah Mudrosky

Four Months Later I puke on the sidewalk between us Sorry about your heart Sorry about your shoes

23

Sarah Mudrosky

While You Are Away No one saw the exit sign flicker, the fruit go rotten, or the milk turn; the bread dry up and bloom turquoise [If a tree falls] There is nothing more still than the clean shape of an unlit cigarette An unbursted pomegranate on a board plump beneath a poised knife

24

EsmĂŠ Pine

The Backseat of Your Car Still, when we were driving home from Vermont, on that first night it looked like winter, and we passed the many houses glowing like lamps, each a sort of orb settled in the hill, I looked deep through them, to snowy trees out back, through windows like shadowboxes, and I wanted to live in each one.

25

Yvette Schnoeker-Shorb

Wind Shift The wind turns wild as fire trucks roar by, the scream of their sirens wailing, trailing back to me; somewhere in the shadows shifting at the top of old elms, the cicadas stop singing and the trees fall silent in the drift of dark, misty smoke.

26

Sabrina White

Jocelyn my sister talked louder than anyone i’ve ever met, slurpy, slimy words that slopped around on my plate. she cracked crackers over her soup and burnt her toast on sundays. one time we made apple pie and she added too much lemon juice and ruined it. we all ate it just like we ate the first pasta she ever made, when she couldn’t wait for the pasta to boil. she had honey tea and an aspirin for breakfast and we didn’t know she never had seconds until a couple years later. my sister bossed me around our neighbour’s pool when our summer skin was ripe. we had mermaid hair and mermaid songs but our legs got tired when we tried to hold them together. she never wore shoes when we crossed the street and the sticky tarmac burned her feet. some nights she would throw storms at my mother. i only looked in her diary once and put it down when i didn’t see my name anywhere. my sister fell asleep in a snowbank in a subdivision in vaughan, her eyes full of skies. her body was humming. she probably didn’t want to die. her nose turned blue first and then her fingers and then her knees and then her lungs turned blue. when they found her, her liver was silver and her cold gums couldn’t stop smiling. she was wearing the same shirt she wore the time she told my nana to fuck off.

27

Fiction

Just Toss Me a Bone, Woman!

I I I Rachel Laverdiere

I

sense the change in my relationship with Dom as soon as she walks in on me gnawing at the crotch of her favourite black-laced panties. I shrink back, trembling at the thought that she might yell obscenities at me or throw me out for the last time. I cower between the bed and wall, pretending to be invisible.

“Maaa-aaaxxx! Where are you?” Dom calls. I ignore her, hoping she hasn’t heard me voice my delight as I slurped up her sweet honey juices.

The blissful coconut lime conditioner precedes her entrance. Judging from the flip-flapping of her feet, she’s wearing her fuzzy bunny slippers. As she approaches this side of the bed I hear droplets of water plop onto the floor. This must mean she’s going out. Elation, from moments ago, is replaced by fear. Now fear is losing ground to a mixture of jealousy and abandonment. Lately, she’s always coming up with excuses to leave me behind to mind the house.

Dom shrieks. She holds up the soggy panties, the half-eaten crotch yawning like an unhinged trapdoor,

Fiction and points at the bedroom door. “Get out!” Dom shrieks. “You’d better think about what you’ve done.

Again!” She yanks off one fluffy bunny and it thuds against my skull. “Know that you’ve sniffed your last pair of panties, Mister,” she says this last phrase rather calmly, which scares me more than the screaming. Dom practically picks me up and tosses me out the back door.

“I guess it’s the doghouse for me, again,” I tell no one in particular. She’s already slammed the door in my face. She used to find my antics endearing.

“Come on, woman! You could toss me a bone just this one last time!” I whine and pound on the door. It’s pouring out here.

“Shut up!” The words are hurled at me from neighbouring houses, but Dom is giving me the silent treatment. I keep begging her to let me in, but the door does not open. She’s beyond caring what the neighbours think. She must be even angrier than I’d assumed.

There’ll be no reprieve tonight.

As I slink away, I hang my head in shame and silently vow to gain a modicum of self-control. Although I could go anywhere tonight, I remain faithful. I’ve never loved another. Part of me wishes Dom had humiliated me more. I’ve heard of what can happen once the dominant partner grows weary of her submissive.

I gaze up at the cloud-filled sky in search of Sirius, the star pattern that’s become my comfort in times like these, but nothing shines through the cloud cover. I inhale the ozone-infused air and dodge puddles as I cross 32

Rachel Laverdiere the street to the dense foliage of the neighbour’s caragana bushes so I can keep watch over our house. I’ve fallen asleep in the neighbour’s bushes when I hear the distinct rev of Dom’s engine. She squeals the tires just a little as she shifts from reverse to first gear. I love that she is a risk-taker. I love that she dares to be bold in her softness.

I creep towards the deck and settle on the outdoor settee, almost certain she won’t be home until mid-morning. It’s Friday night and Dom had been saving those panties for a special someone. I feel so glum, but I refuse to believe our relationship has gone to the dogs.

I I I

***

The sun wakes me as it blazes fiercely upon my face.

It’s going to be a scorcher, and I’ve got a major case of cottonmouth. I squint my eyes against the powerful rays and try to focus in on the driveway. My heart sinks.

I trot back to the bushes across the street I used as a lookout last night. I’m a little pissed at her, I realize as I take a whiz, so I decide to go wherever the day takes me.

I need some grub and a drink. They’re usually generous with me over at The Oriental Palace. The old man who guards the alley has a naughty Chinese hairless crested named Nao Nao. Sometimes he lets me take her to play in the park.

He’s out there, holding a cigarette against his twisted yellowy-brown teeth. As soon as he sees me, he mo33

Fiction tions for me to come with his knobby, yellowed fingers.

He speaks to me in his language and I speak in mine.

Neither understands the exact words of the other, but I realize he is in need of friendly company. We speak through our eyes and our bodies as we sit out there in the alley. I smell day-old eggrolls in the bag next to him.

He reaches in and offers me one. I am so happy I can’t help but do a little dance for the old man. This makes him laugh, which exposes his blackened gums and dangling molars.

Nao Nao is nowhere to be seen. I have a sudden recollection of the smell I had noticed coming off of her skin the last time I came around. But I really can’t say how long ago it was. She must have been ill. The glumness returns as I sit next to the old man. I let him wrap his arms around me as he weeps for Nao Nao. I feel a whimper growing at the back of my throat, knowing I can no longer return to The Oriental Palace.

He will either grow too needy because I remind him of her, or I will cause him nothing but pain for the same reason. I memorize the weight of his soothing hand on my shoulder.

I gobble up the bowl of food and drink that he has offered before I sing for him. We negotiated a song and dance in exchange for a meal since the first time we met in the alley. Today I sing him an improvised song of sorrow with the most solemn of interpretive dances in my repertoire. Then, exhausted by emotional exertion, I stagger down the alley, towards the park where Nao 34

Rachel Laverdiere Nao and I used to play. I venture towards the sandbox she loved to shit in. I plop onto the ground and force myself to keep the howling trapped at the back of my throat.

The sweet smell of flowers quickly becomes cloying.

It’s time to move on. The sun has grown ferocious. The dragonflies’ wings are diaphanous. A kaleidoscope of silvery Boisduval’s Blue butterflies flits above an ornamental sage bush. I can’t help but chase them. In my younger days, I avidly chased and recorded descriptions of prairie butterflies. I was a birdwatcher. I used to swim in rivers and ponds, as free as a bird, but Dom always has me on such a short leash. My hobbies and my adventuring have pretty much spluttered to a halt since we met.

As I run with the wind, I am reconciled with freedom. I feel the unbinding of long-forgotten muscles, a reunion with the wind. It caresses my hair and whistles in my ears.

I I I

***

Nothing looks familiar, but the sun is still searing and my ears have been picking up on a multitude of birdsongs. It seems as though I am the only one paying attention to the crescendos in their love songs and to the sounds of their lovemaking. People look at glowing screens and seem to talk to themselves as they hurry along the sidewalk, completely ignorant of the beauty they are passing.

35

Fiction I find a freshly mown, sun-dappled patch of lawn. It becomes the mezzanine of nature’s cathedral. I sense the worms and ants scurrying below me, so self-sufficient they reproduce alone. The squirrels are yipping dementedly in the trees above, tails upright and oscillating in synchronization with each bark as they try to lure a mate. I hear feral cats groaning as they copulate in the alleys nearby. It truly is a love fest in the animal kingdom.

I lie here, in the middle of it all, feeling so moved, so impassioned, and yet so removed from my own natural tendencies.

“She’s truly neutered me,” I lament to the ants and the squirrels. A sob escapes the back of my throat. For a moment nature ceases procreation, in tribute to my loss.

I hang my head again. It’s time to move on.

I I I

***

Dom and I used to walk by the river on afternoons like these. No matter where I am in the city, I can always smell my way towards the river. Dom found this innate sense of direction strange in the beginning. At first, she said I had overabundant energy and would joke that it was a good thing she was still a woman in her prime.

I wonder if she’s grown impatient with me over the years because this tendency to be overzealous hasn’t dissipated, as her friends assured her it would. Recent36

Rachel Laverdiere ly, when I’ve begged her to walk with me, she doesn’t seem the least bit interested.

Soon enough, the rustle of the river is a few bounds away. I will have no problem finding my way back home.

I’ve decided I will do whatever it takes to win back her love: I will listen better, I will not make a mess anymore, I will be loving and attentive and less hyper. Most importantly, I will forgive her for the new man and hope it ends before I feel threatened enough to intervene.

I I I

***

Dom’s been bringing him home every few days. Some nights she’s out until all hours. When she sneaks back in, I pretend to be asleep, but then I spend the rest of the day moping and giving her the cold shoulder. This usually makes her feel guilty and she lets me back into her bed. It makes me sorrowful, knowing I’m only allowed to cuddle up to her voluptuous ass because of her infidelities. Sometimes, when I snore too loudly or fart in my sleep, Dom elbows me or sends me to sleep in the den. Other times she rolls over and I get to be the little spoon. These days, she nuzzles her chin into my neck, drapes her hand on my chest, kisses my forehead and whispers words of endearment into my alert ear. In the morning she smiles at me like she used to and ruffles my hair. Dom plucks at the stray hairs I’ve shed on the sheets as she tells me about her plans for the day.

This is enough to get me through the days of neglect 37

Fiction that follow. The pattern becomes predictable quickly.

She makes an effort not to leave her soiled clothing on the floor and I no longer go into her room uninvited. I learn to accept that this is how things are going to be between us now.

It’s a lazy afternoon after several of these blissful evenings strung together. I’ve been pampered by her love and it feels wonderful. This morning Dom scrubbed my back in the tub and clipped my nails for me. I’ve missed her good grooming habits.

But, in the time it takes for the doorbell to stop chiming, I go from being her prized pet to a mere annoyance.

It’s hard for me to switch gears so quickly. I can’t help feeling territorial. I’d let myself become deluded that she’d ended things with my rival. That she’d come back to me whole-heartedly. That she’d noticed I’ve been training in the yard, running laps to burn off the energy.

I’ve even gained control over my underwear fetish.

But no, they decide to make out right in front of me. He lifts Dom’s summery dress over her head and unhooks her bra. His T-shirt flies over the back of the couch and lands at my feet. I get twitchy. Dom’s acting like a bitch in heat. They don’t care that I’m in the room, or they’re too caught up in the heat of the moment.

Maybe my drab coat blends in with the furniture. His jeans go flying. All I see is a lot of peachy skin and I dry heave when I see he’s even hairier than I am.

I’ve had enough with being a good boy: it’s a dog-eatdog world out there.

38

Rachel Laverdiere I lunge at his dangling testicles—why should he be able to flaunt them in my face like that?—when he flings Dom’s red lace panties towards me. I arch my back, mid-lunge, and snatch up the glorious unmentionables.

As I tumble to the floor and start licking at the heavenly smell of her crotch, I realize that this is the prize I’ve really been wanting all along.

Dom groans, he moans, and I howl in delight. One collective orgasm about to happen.

39

Everything Must Go I I I Brittany Smith

I

come in through our side door carrying a taxidermy squirrel. Neil looks up from his cereal as I stomp the snow from my boots.

“I went to The Marble Fox,” I say, before he has a chance to ask.

“The what?”

“That shop with all the animals on Broadview.” I set the squirrel gently down on the counter. “They’re going out of business.”

“Shit, Becky,” Neil says, shaking his head vigorously like a toddler who doesn’t want to eat something, no no no no. “I really wonder about you.”

My squirrel stands on his hind legs upon a disk of varnished wood with a bronze plaque drilled onto it that reads Tamiasciurus hudsonicus. His front legs are tucked up close to his body like a Tyrannosaurus rex. His cinnamon-coloured tail is erect and bristling as if he’s ready to fight. His mouth is slightly open and I can see the tips of jagged yellow teeth. And his dark eyes are the strangest things: shiny and flat at the same time.

Fiction “I’ve only got a half hour left,” Neil says pointedly.

“We need to get rolling here.”

“Okay, just let me eat first. I’m famished.”

I take out a bowl and spoon and notice the carton of milk that’s been sitting out on the counter for whoknows-how-long since Neil’s breakfast routine started.

Beside it is a box of Honey Nut O’s. My arm plunges deep into the neck of the cardboard box and my hand locates the crumpled plastic bag inside with a small pile of cereal at the bottom. He hasn’t left enough for one serving so I change my mind and reach for the package of processed cheese slices in the fridge.

I carry the cheese to the table, take out the first slice, and unwrap it. The clear plastic slides away easily and leaves a wobbly orange square on my palm. I bite off a corner and savour the way it sticks to the inside of my mouth and coats my tongue. I examine my squirrel. His claws are black at the roots and beige at the tips. They look sharp.

Neil eyes me.

“Shouldn’t you eat something a little more nutritious?” he says.

“I’ll have a vitamin.” I scoop a plastic container of pills from the wicker basket in the middle of the table and pop the top.

He sighs. “You know that’s not enough. You can’t just think of yourself anymore, honey.”

“I’m not pregnant, Neil,” I say and put a pill into my mouth, letting my lips hang apart as I work to get 42

Brittany Smith enough saliva going to swallow it.

I got the vitamins from Claudette at work, who had her kid last year. As Claudette handed over the purple bottle that said “Quest Prenatal,” Alicia looked up from her chicken salad and gasped.

“That’s the same brand as mine,” she said.

Alicia has been taking them religiously for eighteen months, even though she’s had nothing remotely resembling a scare since she and Dom pulled the goalie almost two years ago. Claudette’s head bobbed in approval.

“Lish, you must have the most lovely womb by now,” she said.

We could have been sixteen, clustered around the lunchroom table with unfocused eyes talking about the babies we wanted, and not forty-one, thirty-six, and, in my case, thirty-nine and three quarters. I stood and the metal legs of my chair scraped across the floor.

“Does this stuff actually do anything, really?” I asked.

“Well, yes and no,” Claudette said. “I mean, it helps your body create the ideal environment for a fetus to implant.”

I made the mistake of telling Neil, and now I suspect he thinks of my uterus as a field before a baseball game.

Last week, Neil’s friend Jim and his wife Louise had a Christmas party where everyone brought different 43

Fiction kinds of cheeses to share. We showed up with a fifteen-month Applewood smoked cheddar, a Havarti with little pieces of dried apricot in it that looked like sores, and a jar of Sicilian capers preserved in salt, which doesn’t go with the cheeses at all, but we don’t know what goes, and if I didn’t leave the Global Cheese Boutique right then, I was going to scream.

I took the glass of red wine Jim offered. It was a large globe, so delicate and thin that I felt I might accidentally smash it. As I was sipping, I could sense Neil’s eyes on me from the other side of the room and I knew he wanted me to slow down. Think of the baseball diamond, his voice said inside my head.

Louise wobbled up to me clutching her own glass. “I hear you two lovebirds are trying,” she said. Her fingernails were painted a shade of raspberry and her mouth was a berry-coloured smear. They spent sixty thousand dollars on their little girl, she told me in a hushed voice.

“Wow,” was all I could think to say, and for some reason, I pictured a game show where they won sixty grand and a baby under bright flashing lights accompanied by thunderous applause from the studio audience.

“There’s a clinic in the States with a money-back guarantee. Jim and I found it after we’d tried a bunch of things here in Canada. We should have gone there first.”

She cocked her head to the side, careening slightly toward the mirror, and I worried for the safety of that 44

Brittany Smith wine glass. I avoided meeting her eyes because there was something in them that created a greasy feeling in my stomach.

“We wasted so much time.”

In their bathroom, I put my hands over the place where I think my ovaries are, health class diagrams from grade eight flashing in my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my reproductive organs resembled the sundried tomatoes in the ceramic dish on the dining room table. From the other side of the door, someone laughed. I turned on the tap and let the water rush in a steady stream, blocking out the party sounds. In the toothbrush holder beside the sink were three brushes: two regular adult-sized ones, and a yellow child’s one shaped like a half-peeled banana with the bristles on the tip, where you’d take a bite.

“I’m all used up,” I told Neil that night in bed after the party.

He pulled me into his chest and I inhaled the special mix of skin and deodorant and man-smell that is his own personal blend. The cotton of his white t-shirt was soft under my cheek.

“You’re not eighty, Becky. You’re healthy. When was the last time you even got a cold?”

“I don’t see how those things are connected.”

“Well, I’m just talking about your health. You are unequivocally a healthy person. There’s no reason why 45

Fiction a fetus won’t implant.”

I twisted out of his arms and rolled onto my side of the bed.

“Why does everyone keep saying it like that?”

I’d always wanted to go into The Marble Fox. When I saw the Closing, Everything Must Go sign tacked to the window, I made myself walk through the door. It was dim and hushed and reminded me of a cave. There were animals everywhere, posed in dioramas that someone had made to look like their natural habitat using cotton batting, spray snow, and bare tree branches. A strange chemical smell wafted into my nostrils and stayed there.

The sales guy came over. He was young and fit and dressed in black, and looked like he could be a stunt actor in a movie about motocross racing. He smiled and shook my hand. His palm was broad and firm.

“We’ve got good deals on,” he said. “You can make me an offer.”

I slid my hand out of his and fiddled with the snow fluff that was coming loose on the display to my left.

“Why are you closing?” I asked.

“Ah. Well this building has just sold and the new rent’s too high. There’s not much money in taxidermy anymore. Not the way we do it.”

He crouched beside a groundhog that was perched on its back legs upon a hunk of what looked like brown Styrofoam with some dried grass poking up. I didn’t know what else to do so I hunkered down too.

46

Brittany Smith “See,” the sales guy continued, and his tone was conspiratorial, “we keep the original skulls and leg bones and sculpt the body mannequins with wire. It’s more traditional. Everything’s done in-house. Except for the eyes. Those are from Germany.”

The clinic in the States is called Universal Fertility.

Their Money-Back Guarantee Program maximizes your chance of bringing home a baby and minimizes your financial risk. Our laptop was open to their website. It was all pale purples and greys and the logo was a fuchsia swoosh meant to represent a pregnant belly.

Neil does this, leaves the computer on things that he wants me to see but doesn’t want to tell me to see. I read the page quickly like it was something that I was eating and just wanted to finish. When I arrived at the words “frozen embryo transfer cycles,” I closed the laptop and it shut with a soft put.

I lowered onto the floor beside the desk and stretched out on my back. Above me, the ceiling fan was silent and still. I concentrated on keeping my breathing slow and letting the floor hold me, which is what my yoga teacher Annette always says to do. I could tell that Roger was home because the smell of toast was wafting up through the vents and all the little cracks and holes that exist in a house. Roger moved into our basement apartment in January of last year. His wife Louise was doing chemo at St. Joe’s and he couldn’t commute from their house in Newmarket every day to be with her. He spent his days 47

Fiction at the hospital and his nights here. I don’t think he slept much because the smell of him making toast was rising at all hours. Three months later, Louise was dead and he stayed. Sometimes I think about that empty house in Newmarket still waiting for him to come back to it.

When I got to my feet again, my legs were tingly.

“This is your shop?” I said, turning to face the sales guy.

A look of pain skittered across his face and disappeared.

“It is now,” he said. “Was my dad’s. He had the true passion for it.”

I examined a series of mice arranged to look like they were making a break for a hole drilled into a piece of propped-up plywood.

“Every one’s majestic,” he said, and smiled. “That’s what Dad used to say. See, most post-mortem wildlife designers just do pets and hunter’s trophies. Not him.

He’d have people coming by the shop all the time with animals. Mice their cats caught. A raccoon that ate poison. Roadkill. Some people would even send things in the mail. My brother and I knew not to open those packages.”

I walked on until I reached a display of five squirrels arranged in a circle beside a tree stump. They were standing on their haunches with their tails puffed out.

Their glass eyes gleamed. In the middle of the circle was a small mound of mixed nuts, like the ones that come 48

Brittany Smith in the mesh plastic nets at the grocery store. And the smallest of the squirrels—a grey one with tufts of fur jutting from the tips of his pointed ears—clutched a walnut between his two front paws.

“Where are they going to go after this?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I’ll take some that I don’t sell. The rest, I don’t know.”

I’m going to eat the whole package of cheese slices.

I’m going to pretend that Neil is on clearance sale and he’s just about to walk away in the arms of somebody else. Maybe that will make me want to go upstairs with him and get down to business, because I am withouta-doubt ovulating. I’ve confirmed it with a kit that we bought on Amazon, which was shipped to the house in an unmarked cardboard box like a porno.

Neil slides onto the kitchen chair beside me. His breath smells milky and sweet.

“You ready?” he asks me.

I’m tired. That’s the thing. I’m tired of the way Neil never finishes a jar of pickles and will always leave one or two bobbing in the brine, and if I don’t say something that jar will reside there forever on the door of our fridge. And he’ll get another jar the next time we’re at the grocery store, as if the first one never existed. I’m tired of my biological clock and how making a baby is something I’m supposed to have an opinion about. I think the sales guy’s dad might have been wrong. My 49

Fiction squirrel isn’t majestic, he’s sad. He’s caught between living and dying. He’s not allowed to rot. He’s not allowed to let go.

50

Don’t Upset the World’s Best Second-Rate Writer I I I Anne Weisgerber

I

had no idea how I was going to suppress my hangover enough to dog my way through an afternoon wedding peppered with Helen’s carping, but this one man at the table kept ringing my bell—was he that cad Helen hoped might sit with us? And if he’s who she said he is, then I’d like to bend his ear a bit.

I looked at my wristwatch: 1:47 on a hot summer afternoon, heat crawling down my back. At least it wasn’t Spain, where The Times reported that July 8, 1933 set the record temperature of 113 degrees. Nearer to home, citizens in the hamlet of Barnesboro, while frying an egg on the pavement for a local news item in late June, witnessed a section of that rural highway explode.

Our steward—Stuart, by the way—was doing his best to keep up with dusty cries for ice water and Pimm’s, Pimm’s and ice. Going to the ceremony this morning on a lark resulted in our being invited to the luncheon, and since we had no plan for the day, Helen said, “Come let’s go, hell or high water.”

We were sat at a corner table, close to the string

Fiction quartet. Listening to the music gave me ample chance to study the man—about my age (30? 35?), familiar face— and then his name registered: Kenneth Leggett, the coffee and tobacco heir who Winchell shellacked with thin coats of gossip. I’d certainly like to talk to him, as that might prevent me from having to speak to Helen during this brief hiatus from our unacknowledged divorce.

Helen, having decided I was too tiresome to carry along in conversation, swiveled to face the adjacent Mrs. Diamond, and they wasted no time loudly and metaphorically lamenting my refusal to let Helen buy an ostrich clutch from Bergdorf’s.

“Darling, you know it’s not within our means at the moment,” I said simultaneous to the string quartet’s pottering adaptation of “Sheep May Safely Graze,” which served to emphasize my belief that the Shepherd himself should occasionally rest his crook and shrug off a loss.

“John,” she said without bothering to turn, “you could fry an egg on that hot lie,” and everyone except Leggett and the steward laughed at my expense.

It was already too late for Helen and me, and I felt no lingering attachment. Even here, as mischievous additions to a wedding, her seated directly across from me so that all I could see were candles and roses and her, I couldn’t stop imagining scenarios that led to my happy ensconcement with my mistress in a cruise liner cabin, or wondering how my friends were faring after last night’s debauchery, which seeped out of my pores.

52

Anne Weisgerber God, that stinking gin. But if Leggett was all I’d heard and a handshake, he’d take my untidy state for a badge of belonging. I’d always felt a lack of connection to the money set, the literary set, until I undertook Samarra and communed with Fitzgerald and Parker. I’d been invited to sit at their very tony tables in New York. I was proofreading Fitzgerald, my God, so by now I’d convinced myself to play the part of someone interesting and entitled. It worked. I was glad to be here in Connecticut at this wedding and eating a good, free meal.

Until that moment, Leggett was singularly entranced by his Bloody Mary, yet at the mention of ostrich, cocked his brow and before anyone knew what had happened, he moved his knife and water out of the way, reached inside his left lapel, and—with some satisfaction—produced a gun. It appeared as though Leggett had caught the scent of a brother fox being hounded, and decided to liven things up.

“That’s genuine ostrich on the grip,” Leggett said as he placed the gun down with a hefty knock, causing silverware to clatter. “It’s a souvenir of my father’s days with the Royal Mercantile.” He challenged his wife to meet his glaring match, and said, “Josie just loves when I trot it out at dinner.”

Leggett was one of those fringe personalities populating the scenery of Walter Winchell’s social commentaries, especially now that Winchell bid the Lindberghs adieu and was running again with his New York set.

Leggett was photographed often, seldom captioned. Al53

Fiction though his father had had enough shares in coffee and tobacco stocks to warrant passing along seats on the exchange to his elder sons—the market was calamitous enough to empty the deepest moneybags, leaving Kenneth short. Yet the heady smoke of his tobacco legacy emblazoned his ego. In hindsight, at that febrile reception for his society cousins, I suppose I still hate Leggett for cashing in my long-held, dog-eared ticket from the Yale coat check. He did so without passing judgment.

Although it was common enough knowledge that I received admittance to Yale, he was the only one at my table in the clubby Cobbs Mill Inn who possessed a Yale sheepskin.

“That’s quite a nice convincer,” I said, standing— as etiquette dictated—for the disturbed ladies who departed the table in search of more savory atmospheres. “Quite the antique. Do you mind if I have a look?” This gave me opportunity to invite Leggett outside to the flagstone terrace for a smoking break.

Leggett agreed, which would get him away from his horrified wife and fellow guests. Being al fresco might divorce me from my headache faster, and show me new pathways to the Pierian spring of New York circles.

“You’re not,” Leggett paused a beat, “some smalltown newspaperman, are you?” as he moved to holster his weapon.

“Goodness, no. I’m an ordinary writer.”

“I see,” he said while stirring his drink then nibbling the stalk of celery. “How ordinary?”

54

Anne Weisgerber “The New Yorker.” How had I not noticed the bulge of that holster before?

“I see,” he said while signaling the waiter for two more Bloodies. He pointed to the veranda. “Well then, let’s go, Mr. Hoity Polloi.”

This was always a terrifying moment for me, when I was about to engage someone I didn’t respect at all in a conversation. I didn’t like him, but I would write him in if I could. I didn’t have a pencil, but I did don my Fosters and follow him outdoors. With glasses, I might close my eyes and attentively commit words to memory until pad and pencil were at hand. It’s something Scott suggested I practice to improve dialogue. I am sure that he and Dottie practiced this on me.

After our cool emetics were brought, Leggett set his on the outside sill and tapped out two cigarettes from a monogrammed case, while I pressed my cool drink against my temple with one hand and cadged a matchbook off a table nearby.

“Hot as hell,” Leggett offered.

“Hot as hell, plus one.”

“Tell me,” he said as I lit the match one-handed, “you’re O’Hara?”

“Yes,” I shook the flame out.

“Looks like you’re having female trouble,” he said, puffed up two Chesterfields and handed me one.

“Could be the heat. Must feel like looking in a mirror. I’m sorry for that.”

I closed my eyes to listen as he drew in some of his 55

Fiction daddy’s good tobacco.

“Yes, it’s like looking at myself in your sun shades.

God, I could use a Bromo-Seltzer,” Leggett said and tipped his head up to blow the smoke and study the blue ceiling of the porch. “How does it feel to be in the club today, O’Hara?”

The divorce club? The adulterer club? Some Yale Venn diagram? I opened one eye to see what he was doing, and followed his gaze upward.

“Haint blue,” I said.

“Come again?”

“The colour. Down South, porch ceilings get painted that blue to drive off bad spirits.”

This pointedly amused Leggett. Caught his fancy so that he herf-hawwed into a half-stifled cough and spill of ashes, which made me both happy and proud of myself. I closed my eyes again to listen hard.

“Good God, O’Hara,” he gathered, entranced by the idea. “How on earth are you and I here together?” The question amused him so much that he wondered at it.

He put down the drink and I suppose if I had been more aware I would have seen him put his drink and cigarette down, and look at me as he pulled out that gun. I was trying to do nothing but hear, to ease the strain on my throbbing head.

I became acutely aware of a shadow, of the smell of metal high in my sinuses.

“Take off those glasses, Mick. You look foolish.”

I opened my eyes to mere slots, and the shadow came 56

Anne Weisgerber into focus.

“Leggett?”

The maw of the barrel no larger than my own blue iris. On my peripheral right, I saw the waiter, having taken half a step our way from the reception floor, one-eightied and disappeared.

He dropped the barrel one scintilla, so both eyes could see he meant it. But he was also holding it nonchalantly, and retrieved his Chesterfield with the other hand, never dropping his gaze. I was going to die a grasper.

“All right. I’ll remove them, gently, carefully,” I said as I swayed a little on my feet. My Fosters fell.

I thought, O Holy Mary Mother of God. I thought, I’ll never be a Yale man now.

Then I dared look away, at some distant oak past the fairways of the old long-lot estate. For a moment, I wished he’d fired. It was so damned hot and miserable and my face felt like cement setting around my eye sockets. Nothing happened.

Time kept passing, and I considered that the Cobbs Mill Inn hadn’t seen a gun drama like this since Burgoyne surrendered to Gates, but Leggett had no intention of giving over anything to Josie, and I knew right then that would Helen get neither an inch nor an ostrich purse from me. We would all have our divorces and none would be shot. Leggett holstered the gun.

“Good lord, you look awful. Put those shades back on, you Fenian ass.”

57

Fiction I blotted my brow with a handkerchief before I picked them up. I could hear cicadas for a moment, and cubes of ice giving up the ghost in this heat. I’d have to compliment our waiter, that bum, on his servitude to the club today. Standing under that blue voodoo, it was good to be still, catching the faint whiff of my own hangover-fermented fear. I put the glasses back on and kept facing Leggett.

He almost spoke, and caught himself.

He finally said, “You and I, we’re triggermen today, O’Hara,” and he stubbed out a cigarette before offering me another. “I’ve got to make a telephone call. Would you mind terribly waiting until I return? I don’t need Josie’s harping on top of that screeching string quartet, and I would owe you a good turn. These wives of ours are murder enough in this heat.”

I agreed. I was so used to playing it cool with Scott and Dottie that I passed Leggett’s perverse battery of tests just now. I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t completely rotten, and he had some pull in New Haven, even if he was a bit sharp.

Here I was after all, my wife having gotten us invited to this shindig while I sat dreaming of fun times on the high seas with my sexpot. Leggett wasn’t content to just dream it, though. He was calling his chippy on the horn this very instant. I wished I were doing the same. I digested that bromide, and chased it with the sounds of the wedding quartet’s chipper rendition of Handel’s Allegro.

58

Anne Weisgerber I knew I’d write him in somewhere. He knew it, too, with a parlour stunt like that.

Rather than a refill, I motioned to the waiter that the coast was clear, and he should fetch me a telephone pad, a pencil, and some extra books of matches. He stintingly asked if everything was all right out here, but I bit my tongue and he handed me what I needed from his waistcoat pocket. I made use of Leggett’s absence and, standing there, scribbled somewhat legible notes.

Leggett returned long after I finished recording my notes, stubbed out my second cigarette and tipped back the peppery dregs. I was feeling a bit loose in the knees from all this fresh air.

He straightened his tie and tucked his belt tip in a loop. Looking sharp, he pointed toward our corner table with his chin and said, “I believe we’re expected.”

He stood in the doorway a moment and added, “Ostriches are idiots, O’Hara.”

With a sweep of my arm, I bid him precede me back to the table.

“Hello,” I said to a potted palm, as I took two or three blind strides coming in from the light, but decided to keep on my glasses in efforts to deceive myself that things were cooler indoors.

I found my way to the toilet and had a good vomit. I was sorry for stiffing the attendant. I didn’t have a dollar. I told him that Leggett was holding my wallet. He’d pay.

59

Non-Fiction

Terroir I I I Darina Blaszczyk

T

here is this notion of terroir when people talk about coffee beans. The subtleties of coffee, nuances impossible to pen down in words by the simple coffee-drinkers that we are, but that nevertheless draw memories to the warmth of our daily cup of salvation: terroir. The latter being just as mysterious as the fingers wrapped around our cup.

Terroir is the quality that gives specificity to the bean.

Terroir is the latitude of the crops. It is the climate and the atmospheric pressure of the geographical location.

It is the chemical composition of the earth. It is the specificity of human methods used to grow, maintain, and yield crops. Terroir is the breath that brings coffee to life.

Terroir is also the struggle of the beans. The wailing vibration coming from the plant as it braces for its life.

Terroir is the identity of the bean imbedded in the physical, chemical, and social properties of its territory.

The present story is an excerpt from my terroir.

It is not composed. It is a struggle for nuance.

Non-Fiction

September 11, 2015: Somewhere in the Plateau, 1:32am.

The nights are awful.

Last night’s coping: “Fuck. You. I broke the unwritten rule. The call. No communication. We agreed. That was all. Fuck.”

It’s only when I am alone that I am drawn to the urge to write to you. Just a word. “How are you?” over e-mail.

A question directed at you. Thousands of miles away.

Seven months, or eight. Who’s counting? I am. Not. Maybe. Only when the curtain of night pins me down.

It feels heavy.

I avoid turning on my side, any side, when I am in bed. Falling asleep. I am afraid to feel you. I am afraid that I would want you to wrap your hands around me. I am afraid that I’d miss the discomfort of trying a thousand and one spooning positions that would allow us to sleep together even if it meant not sleeping at all. I am afraid that I’d miss your playful surprises in the morning. Middle of the night. At dawn. At dusk. You would press against me. Land a peck on the back of my shoulder. Just at the axis of the curve of my neck. And it would be Fire.

A secret. An embarrassing one. That I can only utter in the security of knowing that you won’t read this.

Ever.

Your roommate. The one that stayed. My yoga teacher. Me, befriending him? It happened because of you.

Because I wanted to keep the murmur of your presence 64

Darina Blaszczyk around me.

Silly. Isn’t it. No question mark. Because I respect and admire him as a teacher. But he’ll always be the roommate. Even when he came over, two weeks ago, and I had soup with him. Coconut curry butternut squash soup. Flirty. Fancy. I made it for me. For him. So that we could sit on my kitchen table and talk about anything and everything but you. Eggshells cracking all around us.

He had soup in my bowl. With my spoon. So that I could feel you through the Pink Elephant in the room.

Mind you, the elephant was in the corner. Nevertheless pink. There. Trunk and all.

Us is what is killing me. Not me. Not you. Us. The wholeness of two people. The couple that I was afraid of being.

Now, I miss it.

As unorthodox as it was.

Falling asleep face down on a pillow is not an option either. Lying on my stomach is hard. I drift away with a recollection. Flashes. Memories. White floor boards creaking. My hands pressing against them. Holding my entire torso up under the weight of your body. The light coming from the windows retreating as the day went on.

My wrists kept pushing away from the floor.

For hours.

Flashes.

65

Non-Fiction

October 15, 2015: Player’s Theatre, 9:30pm.

The theatre this evening.

I want to be desired. Not by the man sitting to my right. I want to be desired by you. Contemplated. Admired. Wanted. Lusted after. Passionately desired. By you.

He had your features. The man to my right: curly, untamed hair. Broad shoulders molded beneath a T-shirt.

Athletic build and short shorts in winter. Basic colours.

Tones of blue. Wide smile and unapologetic laugh.

Magic and a joie de vivre beyond the constraint of a theatre.

He was you. Poor soul, I never gave him the chance to be himself. Because he was you.

October 27, 2015: Somewhere in the Plateau, 8:06am.

Sunlit living room. As cozy as a shoe box. A contemplative state emphasized by white crown mouldings and a receding ceiling. Leaning back on a burgundy couch half the width of the space. Back against my roommate’s room: her lover had stayed over.

They were awake. My tympanums: stimulated. He was moaning. She was quiet. I was listening.

I remember that I was quiet with you. Couldn’t show affection for the life of me. Quiet lovemaking. Not that I didn’t want to. On the contrary, my mind was full of “babys,” “honeys,” and “boos.” But I could only speak 66

Darina Blaszczyk with my eyes. I hope that they were loud enough.

Now, her lover was somewhere behind the white door leading to her room. Kneeling on her bed. I wished she would moan so that I wouldn’t think of you and I. Suppressing the tingle in my groin.

I could picture his head bobbing back and forth. In orgasmic ecstasy. His bushy thick stash imbued with droplets of sweat.

You never got me to climax. I wonder if he did the same to her. She was quiet. For all I know, he might as well have been masturbating. She was so quiet. I couldn’t have told one from the other.

It wouldn’t have mattered.

It really doesn’t matter if you were able to bring me to rapture either. It was delicious pleasure all the same.

A constant plateau of a tantalizing high. Every now and then, tricking me into believing that I finally might.

Only to pull your fingers and assert yourself in me.

“Baby, I am ready,” you would utter.

The disappointment of a dream half-realized, quickly replaced by the endearing pleasure of feeling the grin on your face rub against my cheek as your weight gave out from under your elbows and onto my body.

I wonder if she was smiling.

They are the “boos” of the house now. I am the wheel that tries not to run over. I listen.

67

Non-Fiction

October 30, 2015: Pikolo Espresso Bar, 10:57am.

The phone we used last night. Miles apart.

Excerpts from your monologue: “This is something that you don’t know about me.

But on days when the sun is high up, I have this need to go out. To be out. Even if it means getting skin cancer.

But then, on gloomy days like today, I feel like anything is allowed. I can stay inside and do whatever I want because the weather outside isn’t nice… Life is easy for a college dropout, you know? Oh, baby, I am so sorry that you are not feeling well. Alright, my love, I am going to let you go to bed.”

Diaries of a preschool boy. Such a beautiful soul, though.

I think that you are less.

Less, as in I feel more than you.

I dislike myself for thinking that way, because you are beautiful in the purest, unadulterated form.

I am afraid of not believing that you can be a man.

You are selfish in the adorable sense that kids are selfish. You know, “candy before breakfast because I want to,” disregarding the dietary insanity of that statement.

It doesn’t mean that you are not good. It just means that the world is still working its way through you.

Last night’s conversation was yours.

Lying on the floor, turned to one side with my head resting on my arm. Staring at the empty space between 68

Darina Blaszczyk the floor boards and the bookcase. Thinking about having forgotten to sweep under.

Dust bunnies. High on wine and cough syrup, plus a fever. It was no night to “talk things out.”

I let you call me “love” and “baby” after so many months of silence. Where was I? High on wine. And cough syrup. Could not have spoken up even if sober.

Honey slithering down my melting heart upon hearing those words.

I’ve started believing in profanities. Yes, it scares me.

Yes, it makes me feel vulnerable and exposed. I swear.

I could only smile and small talk my way out of a conversation with you about a dog shitting on your door step, a trip to Fiji, and the nuisance that leaving a place you don’t want to leave is to you.

It makes me flustered.

You know, you sounded happy.

Screw your political correctness. Your mom herself told me once that we need to take a side if we want things to happen. You love your mother.

It is your life: your healthy, good-sounding life.

Stay there. Continents away. Pick a damn side. Work there. Be happy. Just for as long as your visa doesn’t expire. And if you are still happy when that happens: Marry someone, Get a flat.

Have babies!

I want you to be happy.

Don’t come back. Do everything you can to see 69

Non-Fiction where that happiness leads you. Don’t evade it because you made the decision to buy a plane ticket home, out on a whim, months ago when you were just starting and miserable. You were also impulsive. We can all be reckless. We are all reckless.

I’ll stay here, at home. You follow your happiness.

There. Continents away.

November 20, 2015: Plume Café, 8:10am.

Unfazed magic. Quiet. Animated, like a movie reel with no soundtrack. This is how the world feels beyond the window shelter of the café this morning.

A coffee mug patiently cooling down on the table before me. A conversation over text message with a friend who knows more than I’d like to admit.

There was no question. Words just came out. On their own: “He’s a college dropout. Which shouldn’t define him. But it does. Even more so because he closes himself in his happiness. Settles down in his immediate response. I find that to be beautiful, on the purest of levels. But I can’t relate to it. I can only admire.”

A minute later. A question now. She knows what to ask: “Do you still want him in your life? To keep in touch with him?”

“No. Though he needs to help me maintain that ‘no’ because I feel it as a ‘yes.’ With all of my heart. I want 70

Darina Blaszczyk him with all of my heart. He’s beautiful. Though I fear that he might not be my beautiful.”

Unfazed magic.

Because “baby” and “my love” feel so good pressed against my ear.

December 9, 2015: Hof Kelsten, 10:42am.

Went beyond myself. The e-mail I sent whispered I miss you.

It tore out of me.

Seconds later, my phone seemed to be having spasms. Image after image. Coming in hot from the day that had just unraveled, it seemed.

An oyster platter, you shucking the oysters, your living room, your bathroom, your living room from two other angles, your front door and the backyard where your little shack nestled. Small and cozy. Images.

Your take on my I miss you? A snapshot of a life outside of my jurisdiction. You could have been talking to me. I can’t be sure.

I need words. Less of a plea, more of a question put forth by a shrinking heart. My shrinking heart.

You’ve never been well-versed in expressions. Neither have I. I think that we need an effort to clear the confusion.

We speak in different languages. You, with actions; I, with sounds. I see bridging these two opposite ends of 71

Non-Fiction the communication spectrum as detrimental.

I need clarity, to walk away from confusion. I am able to self-inflict enough of it to know that I can’t have any permeate my environment.

Your language fascinates me and I am trying to learn, but I miss you takes a lot out of me.

Me, I, mine, and my. Jeez, I sound so selfish. I should just let you be.

January 25, 2016: L’Artiste Affamé Café,12:15pm.

“I can’t…” you said as pearls of sweat began to form at the edge of your hairline.

“What?” I whispered. Not questioning. Rather, bracing for what was to unfold.

Look how beautiful we are, I drifted in reminiscence for that second-long interval before you pulled away.

Your creamy skin and my olive glow, our bodies entwined.

“I can’t make love to you.”

I’ve heard this before. Different context. One we overcame. This time, the tone was definite. I tried not to show my immediate disappointment. I could feel the magic withering away.

“We don’t have to,” my palm came to rest as it slid from your forehead down onto your cheek. Lovingly, because this is how I am with you months after we had last spoken, I stared back into your closed eye lids. I 72

Darina Blaszczyk could peel the confusion right off of your face. Folds of your forehead deepening.

You lifted off of me and rested down on your back.

In one seamless motion, I found myself laying down on your chest. Just like we used to. You avoided my eyes. Of course you did.

I knew about the girl, continents away. You didn’t know that.

“What is happening? Tell me.” I tried to be reassuring. No need to yank a confession from right under your guilt. I knew it was coming. With you, I’ve learned to be patient. I’ve always been.

I can’t help but be overwhelmed with sadness. The thought of living off the polychromatic feelings that these three weeks could have meant for us crumbles under “I met someone.”

Right before your lips dared cross that line half an hour ago, I told you about him. About how I had made it clear to him that I won’t hold back around you. About how he was okay with it. About how I need you to be okay with it, before you touch me because once you do, I won’t be able to say no. You chose to pursue. You chose!

Now, it was all about the talk you had had with her only two days ago. How you were going to pursue romance across borders. How you two had decided that it was okay to see other people only based on the physicality of a situation. You couldn’t “make love to me” because that would defy the agreement. Because feelings would develop. Because you would feel things for me.

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Non-Fiction Because you would feel the romance across borders that you and I already were.

Fuck.

Your feelings. Fuck. I don’t want them.

I want you despite and in spite of myself. I don’t want your romance. I don’t want you to torture me with phone “baby,” “honey” and “boos.” I can’t let myself be infatuated with you when you are away, but I definitely, desperately, want to be infatuated with you when you are here. For three weeks, nothing more and nothing less. Three weeks of me and you and us.

Then you can go off loving her and I can continue seeing him.

Two days later, all of this led to nothing more than words on a screen and a promise for a continuation: “I’ll see you sometime. Wave emoji. Have a good year.”

“We’ll bump again. Smiling emoji. Globe emoji. Animal tracks emoji. Willowing branch emoji.”

My terroir is your territory. We are the same: conditioned by the factors of our environment. We go to the same places, we drink the same coffee. We share the same turf. My struggles are your struggles. My struggles are your nuances.

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The Gulf I I I Devi Yesodharan

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he first friends I have in Dubai are Simon, a Goan boy who is missing a front tooth for the entire five years I know him, and an Egyptian girl named Laleh. We’re eighties kids, the children of immigrants, with bangs cut straight across the front and white bread sandwiches in our school lunchboxes. We’re fans of Inspector Gadget and Vicki the Robot. Sixteen years later, the apartment blocks we live in will be razed and redeveloped, and several small companies will be served notices for wall and ceiling paints containing lead. I will speculate about the neighbour’s kids on the third floor—bullies who tracked me down stairwells to shove or trip me over. Were they just mean, or had they been turned that way, showing the classic symptoms of irritability and overlarge heads?

My friendship with Simon starts out entirely transactional. He trades me his glucose biscuits for homework answers and whispered prompts for spelling quizzes. We become good enough friends that one day I give him a treasured pink plastic spoon from my collection,

Non-Fiction the kind that comes free from inside Nestlé Cerelac tins. I am six, but Cerelac is still my favourite food, its goopy sweetness something no meat or vegetable can compete with.

Laleh is different. We walk down school corridors with our hands disappearing into each other’s and synchronize our movements like soldiers. We swap hair accessories and tweak our uniforms identically—socks rolled down, belts tied loose, collars turned up. She talks a cooked chicken off its plate, as she puts it, telling me in words that run over one another about her aunts, women crowded around the single kitchen stove cooking up a storm of things whose names are promises: Feseekh, Basbousa. Uncles sipping undrinkable coffee from toy-sized cups. The olive and mulberry trees back at her family home in Egypt. I lean my head against her shoulder and listen. She is my first great love.

Our playground consists of a swing set and a slide on baking sand. The metal slide glows melt-hot in the afternoons and scalds the skin of your bottom and thighs. We look at it wistfully, but some kid in the class above us says that, last summer, a boy slid down and his skin came right off. The skin stuck to the slide like a discarded pair of pants until the janitor came and scraped it off. We stay away. The rubber tire swing, however, we fight hard for. We know the exact wrist move needed to flip over anyone who overstays their turn. Still, the blistering sun eventually drives us to the razor-thin shade on the edge of the playground where the tin roof of the 76

Devi Yesodharan school building protrudes a tiny bit.

In doing this, we are following the old rules of this place, where refuge is doled out in small pieces. The earth of this fiercely indifferent desert is something that does not cling to your skin, but falls away easily. Thirst is the great shadowless horror that stalks the people here, burning them within and without. The tribals and bedouins survived by discovering hollows in tall sand dunes containing water filtered from rain. They grew date palms in these nooks and built small huts made with the branches of the same trees. They evolved complex rights over who got to draw water from the shallow dune wells, how often and when.

But this hard-fought, eked-out life is now changing.

Laleh, Simon, and I have found each other in a halfmade city that still cannot believe its luck. Discovered oil does not just mean money, but eye-boggling amounts of it for each refined gallon, for a people whose wealth used to be counted in ripe dates and yards of camel hide.

There’s nothing like possessing something that virtually sells itself. Propelled by the dark spewing fountains, the government builds the city around us at great speed, as if the oil, like those shallow dune wells, will disappear at any moment. Buildings come up fast, a floor added every week. Growing vertical so that everyone can see.

Money comes in like the river the land had thirsted for, and forces the desert into retreat. The people feel no remorse. The river of money they ride on is an un77

Non-Fiction mitigated escape from a place where it’s hard to even mark a grave, for the sand holds nothing. And perhaps that’s the one great difference in how they view modernity here, compared to more fertile places. There are no songbirds, no forest canopies to preserve. Whatever shade they need must be built out of cement.

We were early arrivals, but a whole workforce follows us. I see Indians and Pakistanis and Sri Lankans and Americans and Filipinos—mostly men, young and half-shaven, as if there isn’t enough water for a shave.

Construction and shipping technicians, oilrig workers, doctors, builders, bricklayers, teachers, fire engine drivers, accountants, architects.

The world streams in, offering ice-cold Coke in one hand and Mars chocolate bars in the other. I couldn’t believe the almond ice cream bar the first time I put one in my mouth. I had never eaten anything as sweet and cold as this. It hurt my teeth. It’s our first taste and we swallow it whole; this country and I enter into awareness together.

In the early days, I see only men on television. It is an Arabic channel where mullahs preach to the camera, their beards like bird nests. When I am six, Dubai launches Channel 33, its own local channel that licenses and broadcasts American shows like Dallas and The Bold and the Beautiful, black and white Elizabeth Taylor movies, and British game shows like Blockbusters. They take out all the kissing and sex; it is Western culture on their terms.

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Devi Yesodharan Still, it changes things. Shops start selling knee length and sleeveless dresses. Hair stylists fresh out of beauty school open parlours. The local women let their hijabs fall back loosely so you can see highlights in their hair, styled like Princess Diana’s or Janet Jackson’s, sprayed big and stiff. They wear red lipstick paired with dark kohl eyes at three in the afternoon, and we gather at the back window of our school bus and gawk at them walking on the shopping streets. These women still walk behind their men. I gaze at their wordless beauty, the recognition of which coils low down in my stomach.

They’re the sirens going off in the desert to signal that things are changing.

My father is suffering from something in retrospect.

He has a reflexive hostility with which he responds to the world and to me. He gets a favourite teacher of mine fired, saying she insulted him. When he is angry he whips me with a thin rubber rod that came with a kite-making kit, a birthday present I had never managed to assemble. It swishes through the air with a horrible sound. He is big-bellied and soft-armed, but just about strong enough for this. The tears I cry, he says, should be grateful ones since he is teaching me something.

Ice cream becomes taboo. I can’t eat it because it’s bad for my throat. Laleh loves strawberry ice pops that stain her lips red, and when she finds out I’m not allowed she offers me a bite. It becomes a thing. I always get a taste. When my father comes to pick me up he sees 79

Non-Fiction this in action. He says, “Don’t share these things with her. She’s dirty.” I know enough about both him and her by now, and that is what saves me from learning his anger and practicing it myself. Laleh is wholly herself, gentle, and generous, and this certainty about her inoculates me.

His rage makes me want to reinvent myself away from him. Rid myself of everything we share: the fiercely curling hair, the shape of the mouth, the accent, the wide space between the first two toes. Rid myself of a relationship marked by two ends of a whip. But I don’t know how because he blocks the escape routes. I am not allowed to leave the house after school. “It’s too unsafe.” His rules are an ankle bracelet that keeps me home.

We grew up together, but the city quickly leaves me behind. I sit for hours outside on the balcony watching the traffic. The city’s sounds rise towards me, but by the time they reach my ears they shrink to whispers.

Dubai is delivered to me in fractions. The girl in the building opposite waves at someone I cannot see. Something falls with a great shattering sound around the corner. My body angles away from the walls of the apartment, pushed against the balcony railing in my longing to leave. Long stretches of my time pass like this.

Every year, we pose for family photographs as my father struggles with a camera. When I look at these, Dubai is barely visible: the edge of a street sign, a date palm in one corner. The conversations in the house are 80

Devi Yesodharan deeply insulated, a vault keeping the city out. Conversations are about relatives, other Indian families here and India. The television shows they encourage me to watch are not my favourite, but mythological, religious tales broadcast on Indian television. These arrive in Dubai recorded three episodes per videotape, and are rented out of the Indian corner stores. We go shopping in the Indian markets, where we buy gold bangles and necklaces in Indian designs—peacock and lotus motifs with enamel work—that my mother wears on her trips back to India. I get polyester-acrylic dresses unsuited to the desert weather. These have chintzy gold buttons, hang with five inches to spare off my body, and come in unfashionable lengths. The T-shirts permitted for me must cover my hips.

When I am nine, my father takes me to the port on a day my mother is at work, and he is forced to babysit me. We watch the ferries. I’m hoping to see a camel in a boat. I see no camels. But we watch the boats cross the old Arabian Sea, which is deep and dark, and still like something out of a folk story, not yet touched by the garbage that will accumulate: the outflow of industry. The ferries landing here are packed with men with leather skin and soft turbans and clothing suited to the desert: wide billowing tunics in white, cream, and pale blue.

These are men who scan the port line and take everything in, including us with equal surprise. We, like the buildings, and the oilrigs, and the Toyotas, are part of things that are very new. We don’t know it yet, but we 81

Non-Fiction will leave just as easily while they’re still here. I return their gaze, equally uncomprehending. In the years that follow, I miss the chance to understand.

When I return to India for good at the age of sixteen, the monsoon’s humid months overwhelm me. The giant lizard with his spiralling eye on the mango tree outside my grandfather’s house makes me nervous. My skin explodes in an allergic reaction to mosquito bites.

My grandfather looks on with disappointment. He sees me as someone who no longer belongs, a creature of my adoptive country. But I want to tell him I am not. I stayed apart, not giving it a chance to either embrace or reject me.

The walks along the sea on Beach Road, the souk markets, and Majlis street where you will see chickens in the smaller lanes, the Lebanese bakeries selling roasted nuts mixed together and handed to you in a brown paper bag that warms your fingers as you eat, the belly dancers in the downtown parks, the strong Turkish coffee and second hand books in Al Hudaiba, the Egyptian singers, women with big voices who sing of abandonment and lost love. Somewhere, all of it happened. And I stood on the balcony, straining to listen.

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Flash Fiction

For the Walk Home I I I Julia Scandella

K

nees to chest, I wait outside his apartment door, grinding grit with the soles of my sneakers. My palms are clammy and red from wiping them on the thighs of my jeans.

I clench and relax my fists, watching the colour of my skin leave and then return again.

I have a short life line. I remember being a little disappointed as my best friend and I compared hands in her room with the latest issue of Tiger Beat spread between us to guide the discovery. We were always looking for ways to predict our lives, and we appreciated the trivial things that let us do so. She’s married now.

I can’t remember what the other lines are. I don’t think the shallow ones mean anything, but they should.

And the faint ones swallowed by the deeper folds.

Those, too. I bet there’s a map of the city somewhere hidden in my palm, from the Old Port to the Mile End, from my apartment to right here.

The small scars I’ve collected from cooking intersect with, or bridge over, the other lines—I can’t decide.

Flash Fiction When my hands are cold, the scars show more. At least the food we ate together was good, always edible and sometimes nutritious.

“Demi?”

My eyes meet his. I brush my hands on my jeans one last time before I get up. We stand for a few too many seconds until we stumble into a hug, an awkward attempt to convince each other that we are perfectly amicable.

He clears his throat. “Do you, uh, want to come in?”

“Oh, no. That’s okay.” Grit is stuck in the rubber sole of my shoe.

He is searching for small talk. My face burns and is uncontrollably itchy.

I start: “So, when did you guys get a cat?”

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Contributors Darina Blaszczyk was born and raised in Bulgaria. Two days after her fourteenth birthday, she moved to Montreal with her family to pursue her education. A graduate of Dawson College, she is now in her third year of a BFA in art history with a minor in human rights. Her passion for travel, chance-happenings, and expression has led her—and continues to do so—to countless hours spent typing stories and poetry before an audience of one and a computer.

Annah-Lauren Bloom is originally from Long Island, New York. She currently studies English literature and sociology at Concordia. Her poetry has appeared in Tender Journal and will be featured in the upcoming Spring 2016 issue of Headlight Anthology. Besides writing, her hobbies include Ina Garten, making super cool music videos starring her hawt roommates, and making collages of weird things she finds on the internet.

Scott Bryson lives in Toronto and works as a writer and editor. He publishes the biannual literary magazine The Broken City, and runs Telescope Media—a music review site. His writing has appeared in Vallum, Broken Pencil, and CHART Magazine, among other publications. His hobbies include drinking beer and talking about Star Wars.

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Soliloquies Anthology Marc Carver has published seven collections of poetry and works for a magazine in New York. He also has around fifteen hundred poems published around the internet. He has run workshops in Texas and has performed his poetry around the world.

Michael Farry is a retired primary teacher living in Meath, Ireland. He writes poetry and history. He was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2011. His first poetry collection, Asking for Directions, was published by Doghouse Books, Tralee, in 2012. His history book, Sligo, The Irish Revolution 1912-1923, was published in 2013 by Four Courts Press, Dublin.

Karissa LaRocque received her BA in English from Mount Allison University. She is currently an MA candidate in English at Concordia University, where she studies confessional poetics, teenage poetry, and anything queer. Her work has been published in The Dalhousie Review, GUTS Magazine, 7Mondays, Zettel, and elsewhere.

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Contributors Rachel Laverdiere currently writes and teaches in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She has worked as a language teacher in South Korea, Quebec, and Saskatchewan.

Rachel’s writing has recently appeared in Soliloquies Anthology, made the Geist 2015 Short Long-Distance Writing Contest Shortlist, and is forthcoming in untethered.

Sarah Lonelodge is a full-time writer and part-time English professor from Oklahoma. She holds a BA in humanities, an MA in English composition and rhetoric, and is currently pursuing a PhD in rhetoric and professional writing. Sarah’s novella To the Everlasting was published in 2014. Other publications include Albeit Journal and Kudzu Vine.

Ilona Martonfi is the author of three poetry books: Blue Poppy (Coracle, 2009), Black Grass (Broken Rules, 2012), The Snow Kimono (Inanna, 2015). She writes in chapbooks, Canadian Woman Studies, carte blanche, Vallum, Soliloquies Anthology, Descant, The Steel Chisel, Fiddlehead, Montreal Serai, Sunday@6. She produces The Yellow Door and Visual Arts Centre Readings, and is co-founder of Lovers & Others. QWF 2010 Community Award.

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Soliloquies Anthology Michael Mingo is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Angle, ArLiJo, Jersey Devil Press, and Pirene’s Fountain, among others. He originally hails from Vernon Township, New Jersey, and pursued his undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

Sarah Mudrosky is a Montreal writer of fiction and poetry, currently studying creative writing at Concordia University. Her work has appeared in Creations Magazine and Subversions. She enjoys road trips, repurposing trash, and underlining typos in books. She is not in the habit of sharing her work, but she’s hoping to change that.

Esmé Pine is an Honours English and Creative Writing major at Concordia, minoring in art history. Between editing poetry for The Void Magazine and failing to keep on top of her school readings, she works part-time at a book store. She likes long naps and short walks on the beach.

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Contributors Julia Scandella is a Montreal born-and-raised writer and editor. When she is not proofreading medical journals, she is undertaking freelance projects. When she is doing neither of those things, she is probably watching Netflix. Lover of puns and Post-its, she completed her BA in Honours English and Creative Writing at Concordia University and has since been learning how to “adult.”

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb’s work has appeared in Caesura, Dark Matter, Tracer, Terrain.org, Pedestal Magazine, an anthology of science poetry edited by Dr. Neil McAlister, Blueline, and many others. A past Pushcart Prize nominee (Poydras Review) and a recent Best of the Net nominee (Dirty Chai Magazine), she holds an interdisciplinary MA from Prescott College and is cofounder of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit natural history press.

Brittany Smith is a Toronto-based writer of long and short fiction. Her work has appeared in Broken Pencil Magazine, and in the journals Pithead Chapel and Echolocation. Most days you can find Britt working at her dream job as a writing coach at Firefly Creative Writing.

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Soliloquies Anthology Anne Elizabeth Weisgerber has recent or forthcoming stories in New South, Tahoma Literary Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Vignette Review, and Revolution John. She is a freelance fiction editor, writes reviews for Change Seven Magazine, and reads fiction for Pithead Chapel. She loves her writing squads: #fishtankwriters and #storytalk. Follow her @AEWeisgerber, or visit anneweisgerber.com.

Sabrina White was born in a really boring suburb outside of Toronto. She is a second year student at Concordia University, doing a double major in creative writing and history. She has written plays for Toronto’s Paprika Festival and The Sears Ontario Drama Festival in 2014. She’s new to poetry.

Devi Yesodharan has worked as a speechwriter in the government and the private sector, and has managed communication campaigns for candidates in India’s state and national elections. In 2011 she was awarded the Chevening Gurukul Fellowship by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

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Soliloquies Anthology is a student-run literary journal published out of Concordia University.

We publish emerging and established writers in Montreal and internationally, twice annually in print.

soliloquies.ca Printed and bound in Montreal, Quebec