by Heather Debling

Barbara pointed to the chicken she wanted. It would have bothered her once: the wholeness of the meat, the unplucked skin, the head lolling about, the wattle—if she looked at it hard enough, long enough—still seeming to shudder. But after her trip, she would find what was once normal to be unnatural, her stomach turning at all the headless little chicks lined up in a row at the grocery store, cling-wrap worn like a second skin, tight hospital corners to hold in the juices.

When she first arrived in Argentina, Barbara had thought there was some fundamental genetic difference between her and these people who lived so much more openly—their exposed skin, their wide gestures, their loud exclamatory outbursts, a stream of harsh or joyous words punctuated with the slapping of arms or cheeks. But when the cold snap began, she’d seen these people assume familiar postures—heads ducked, clenched fists tucked protectively up shirtsleeves, shoulders raised to rub some warmth back into earlobes—and she’d realized: it’s the cold that turns us inwards.

The two women were huddled together at the booth. Barbara pointed again to the chicken and then looked at one of the women as if to say, How much?  The woman said something, but too fast for Barbara—who only had basic Spanish—to understand, so she held up her hand to double-check. Four?  The woman nodded. Barbara smiled and gave a sharp nod of her head. That was easy.

The woman picked up the chicken Barbara had first pointed to, then the one beside it and then the one beside that one. Barbara had to shake her head—No! No! No!—her hands X-ing the air in front of her like a pair of dull gardening shears. She felt rude because María, the cleaning woman who came with the house Barbara was renting (no matter how adamant Barbara had been that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself), did the same thing to Barbara whenever she did something foolish or unhelpful—¡No!—the only word they seemed to have in common. But how else was Barbara to tell the woman that she’d misunderstood, that she had no need of four whole chickens?

After she’d decided to spend a year travelling alone around South America, Barbara had borrowed Spanish language CDs from the library and practiced on her drive to and from work. ¡Buenos días! Muchas gracias. No entiendo. She had started jotting down key phrases in a notebook, using pronunciation spelling. “Dawn-day-stale-bano” so she could always find a restroom and “may-paw-aril-are-you-there” so she could ask for help. She’d taken her time practicing each word, trying to give her mouth time to memorize the right movements, savouring the different sounds she was learning to make. Her lips and cheeks had been sore afterwards, but it was a pleasant ache, the pride of working life back into numbed muscles.

But one day when she was stuck in traffic, Barbara saw a man in the next car giving her a funny look, the corners of his mouth turning up as if she was somehow amusing him. She still listened to the CDs after that but began resting her elbow on the window frame, her knuckles against her mouth so no one else could see her lips moving. And the sounds becoming muffled, had caged in her throat. When she tried to say the words now, they felt unnatural, much too loud, too exclamatory; her lips and cheeks rigid, no matter how much the sounds pushed against them.

Barbara pointed her finger at the one chicken she did want. How much I (she pointed at herself) pay (she mimed counting out bills) you (she pointed at the woman.) She lifted one finger at a time, counting to four. No response. Barbara held up her thumb. Five?

The woman clucked her tongue. She flashed open her hand impatiently, her left to Barbara’s right, as if they were playing the mirror game. The woman’s hands were swathed in strips of brightly coloured fabric to keep out the cold, either the sharpness of the wind or the tightness of the bindings flushing the tips of her fingers. Five. Barbara began rooting around in her fanny pack, eager now for the transaction to be done. When she looked up, the woman was smiling broadly at her. Hanging upside down from her hand, five whole chickens—their heads swaying about, knocking into each other, one bird’s beak nuzzling the neck of the one next to it.

Barbara took the chickens from the woman and then fanned some bills out in front of her with her spare hand so the woman could choose what she felt a fair price. She probably took too much, but Barbara pretended she didn’t mind. That’s the price you paid for these kinds of impulsive purchases.

*****

Barbara had always been cold. When she was growing up, her father had kept the house at a penny-scrimping 61ᵒF. If Barbara or her mother complained, he just told them to put on another sweater or a thicker pair of socks.

There was only one place you could find temporary relief from the cold in her father’s house: the shower. He kept the water hot, scalding hot, to ensure everything was properly sanitized. Barbara’s skin steamed the tender pink of baby shrimp through the thick, yellow rubber gloves she wore when washing dishes. Her father would stand outside the bathroom with a stopwatch whenever she was in the shower and bang on the door when her five minutes were up. Barbara couldn’t count the number of times she’d had to go to school with shampoo residue clinging to her hair, or a tight squeezing headache from trying to wash it away with cold water in the sink.

Years later when her mother died, Barbara’s father moved into her spare room. She told him he could bring whatever he liked—clothes, furniture, knick-knacks—and that she’d make space, but he arrived with just two suitcases and a cardboard box he’d gotten for free at the local discount grocery store. The box smelled of Spring Fresh laundry detergent.

He had spent all afternoon alone in his room unpacking. When he finally came out for supper, he was wearing a dark blue, fisherman sweater that, once snug, was now two sizes too big for him. He rubbed his hands together as he sat down at the kitchen table. “You keep it awfully chilly in here, Barbara.”

*****

Walking back home with her chickens, Barbara passed a stall with a few souvenirs and some newspapers. One local paper had a picture of cattle lying on the grass. They could have been asleep except their eyes were open, their heads and legs resting at slightly unnatural angles—the sunken rigidity only seen with death.

Maggie, a work colleague, forwarded articles to Barbara from all across the English-speaking world about the extreme weather she—and by extension the rest of South America—was experiencing. A few days ago she’d sent a picture of a Chilean man in a parka and sun hat buried up to his waist in snow. Barbara had shuddered. They’d had no snow in Mar del Plata, but it was cold, unseasonably, bitterly cold. Barbara had finally given in and bought socks, scratchy wool ones that she wore two or three thick, the fabric bulging against the straps of her Trekker sandals.

Maggie never wrote anything in the emails, just pasted the URLs, though she couldn’t seem to help putting some trite comment in the subject line: “Brrrrrrr! Hope you’re keeping warm! Did you pack your mitties?” She’d even sent two screen shots from the Weather Network yesterday: Buenos Aires at -4.5ᵒC while Toronto was a balmy 29ᵒC with a smog alert. “Who’s sorry now?!”

Barbara had met Maggie at the photocopier. Their paths might not have crossed otherwise, working, as they did, in different departments—Barbara in editorial, Maggie in marketing. The copier had jammed, and Maggie had every door open, all the innards pulled out as she tried to figure out what was wrong. “Damn!” she’d said, sucking the tip of her index finger which she’d burned as she tried to pull a tiny scrap of paper from one of the metal plates you were never supposed to touch.

“Yes, I have checked the side door, thank you very much,” Maggie said to the copier, furiously pressing and re-pressing the touch screen. She’d turned towards Barbara. “Technology, eh? It would be brilliant if it wasn’t so bloody stupid.”

The copier was temperamental, and Barbara avoided using it whenever she could, not wanting to be seen in precisely the state this woman was in or causing the same kind of inconvenience. Though Barbara had been waiting from what she hoped was a suitably patient three and a half feet away, now that she’d been somehow involved, somehow implicated in all this mess she said, “Do you want some help?”

Maggie groaned in relief and said, “Yes, please,” as she shook Barbara’s hand, transferring some grainy black toner powder onto Barbara’s fingers. “You’re a saint!”

When it was fixed, Maggie had asked Barbara if she wanted to eat lunch together. “I’ll buy you a coffee to say thank you.”

Barbara had agreed, had said something like Sure, that would be nice, since no one else ever bothered to ask her to eat lunch with them. Her colleagues all thought, Barbara supposed, that she enjoyed eating alone at her desk, that she liked wearing down each carrot stick to a soft pulpy mush with her molars so the crunch of them didn’t disturb anyone nearby.

They’d been eating together ever since, four or perhaps five years now, even though Barbara didn’t really like Maggie; she could barely stand her some days, though she knew more about her than probably anyone else in her life.

Her feelings about the new marketing manager, for example. “What a conceited little shit!” Maggie had paused for a moment, swivelled her head around to make sure no one from her department was nearby before continuing. “As if a post-graduate certificate—certificate, mind you, not a proper graduate degree—makes him some kind of expert.”

Barbara knew about Maggie’s hair colour, her pesky ingrown toe nail, her trouble finding a bra that didn’t leave red welts under her arms and across her back, and her children—dear Lord—did Barbara know a lot about Maggie’s children.

“Mackenzie only got a 79% on that English test. A 79! I mean, who gives a 79?”

It was like this most days, Maggie not even saying hello, not even letting Barbara get seated before she started complaining about whatever was bothering her that day.

“Now you know me, I don’t like to get involved. I refuse to be one of those helicopter parents, but in this case I had to. A 79 for God’s sake!”

Maggie took a bite, barely swallowing before she continued, a scummy layer of leftover lasagna coating her tongue. “So I called, and I said to her, to this teacher of Mackenzie’s, ‘What’s the difference between a 79 and an 80?’ She couldn’t tell me.” Maggie took another bite and smiled smugly as she chewed.

“Oh, she spouted off some gobbledygook about Mackenzie’s answers lacking substance, but she could not with any clarity tell me the difference between a 79 and an 80. And yet she’s qualified to tell my daughter she’s just average? ‘Because that, Lady,’ I told her, ‘is the difference between 79 and 80. It’s the difference between average and above average.’”

Barbara always had little to say, finding it hard to share in these workplace camaraderies— the strange, mundane confidences that people who had little in common hoisted upon one another around gold-flecked linoleum tables.

That day, though, when Maggie stopped talking about Mackenzie long enough to take a sip of diet cola, Barbara had said, “I’m thinking of going away.”

“A holiday? You should. You deserve it after everything with your father.” Maggie scraped her fork along the sides of her plastic container. “You were a saint through all of that, Barbara. An absolute saint. I don’t know that I could have done the same.” Maggie took a large sip of her drink, some of it dribbling down her chin and onto her blouse. “Damn!” she said, spitting on her brown paper napkin and scrubbing at the spot. “Of course, it’s different for me. With Jerry and the kids to look after.”

“Not a holiday,” Barbara said. “A sabbatical. A few months, maybe a year.”

“In this economic climate? Are you nuts?” Maggie leaned across the table. “No one’s irreplaceable, you know. And you’ll have no income for a whole year. Have you thought about that? Maybe you think your father left you enough to swan off and be a Lady of Leisure, but mortgages still have to be paid; water, gas, hydro—they all have to be paid, even if you’re not there to use them. Just wait till you’re retired. You’re forty-nine now. Whatever you want to do will still be there in fifteen or sixteen years, won’t it?”

Barbara’s throat tightened as she thought of all those lunches—of the thousands and thousands of lunches she had in store for her over those fifteen years—Maggie talking incessantly about the latest miracle cream she’d found to wipe away her cellulite or her wrinkles; Maggie nearly in tears over Mackenzie’s bulimia or Jerry’s suspected infidelity (It’s such a cliché, Barbara. His secretary for God’s sake!); Maggie on her high horse of self-righteousness over her son’s girlfriend’s pregnancy scare (I doubt it’s even Taylor’s, I mean that girl’s got that kind of reputation. I tried to tell him, you know. I said, why don’t you find yourself a nice girl, one who hasn’t slept with half the rugby team, but would he listen? Young love and all that bullshit.)

“I have to go,” Barbara said. She stood up so abruptly that the edges of her sweater coat caught under one of the chair legs.

“Where?”

“Back to my desk,” Barbara said as she tried to free herself from the chair. “I have work to do.”

“No,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. “On this year-long sabbatical?” Maggie tapped the prongs of her fork against her bottom lip. “Somewhere they speak English, of course. Europe might be nice. A grand tour. You could send me a postcard from every country.” Maggie’s eyes grew wide as she squealed, “Oh! You could spend Christmas skiing in the Alps!”

Barbara had shuddered at the thought. “South America,” she had said, the furthest place she could think of from all that snow. “I’m going to South America.”

She’d come in to work the next day to find a foot-high pile of printouts on her desk, articles about crime in South America—gang violence, car bombs, kidnappings, lots and lots of kidnappings. The particularly salacious passages were highlighted; some had exclamation marks beside them in the margins.

Barbara took the pile to the shredder and let the blades cross cut page after page after page. That’s where Maggie found her, when she didn’t show up for lunch. Maggie opened her mouth to say something, but Barbara put another piece of paper through the shredder, pleased with how the metallic whirring seemed to block out Maggie’s disdain, both in person and on the page. The clear plastic bin was almost full, a pile of white shards with just the odd flecks of black and yellow and hot pink.

Barbara shifted the chickens to her left hand to count out money for a postcard for Maggie. It was a beach scene, the sunbathers as tightly packed and glistening as sardines.“Wish You Were Here!” was scrawled across the bottom right-hand corner.

*****

María was outside sweeping the front steps when Barbara arrived at the house with the chickens. She was wearing sweatpants under a black skirt, and she’d wrapped a shawl around her head, cinching it together under her chin with a row of wooden clothes pegs. And she had floral oven gloves on her hands to keep out the cold.

María was on the phone. She worked all day like this with her head bent to one side, the cordless headset held tightly between her ear and her shoulder. She saw Barbara at the end of the front walk, and her voice changed as it often did when Barbara thought María was talking about her, the volume lowering and something of a mocking smile in its tone. She always felt the guilt of eavesdropping even though she couldn’t understand what was being said.

Barbara held the chickens behind her back, out of sight, kicking herself that she hadn’t just dumped them in an alley or a garbage can somewhere. All the way back to the house, she’d been trying to figure out the best way to broach the subject of the chickens with María. Even if they spoke the same language, Barbara doubted that she could explain this want that had come over her when she’d passed the stall with the chickens, this desire to be shown by María—how to pluck, to gut, to clean a chicken, to have her hands held tight inside the carcass just as María’s always were, to see if the innards steamed the way she imagined they would.

María, of course, never had any trouble making herself understood, having quite the vocabulary of gestures and sounds for Barbara’s ineptitude. Slamming doors if Barbara slept in too long. Clattering the silverware extra loudly as she cleared the table if Barbara hadn’t eaten enough. Turning on her way out the door at the end of the day and shaking her index finger as if she was on the verge of saying something. Don’t make a mess or Stay out of trouble.

In response Barbara would smile helplessly, hang her head, and retreat to her room— actions of avoidance, apology and affirmation. Yes, I am being troublesome. I do make an awful mess of things, don’t I? I’ll try and stay out of the way from now on.

No, Barbara decided. Not this time. She would present the chickens to María. She would hold them out in front of her. Look! See what I’ve brought for you. And though María might press her hands to her head in exasperation—Five chickens! Whatever were you thinking!—Barbara would not be discouraged. She would follow María into the kitchen and no matter how María would try to shoo her away, just as Barbara’s mother used to—Get out, get out from underfoot—by refusing to go, by standing her ground, by taking an interest and then trying to mimic what she’d seen María do with one of the other chickens, and by letting her correct her when she did something wrong, Barbara would earn, however begrudgingly, María’s respect.

And things would be different after that. Tomorrow, when María arrived, Barbara wouldn’t skulk in her bedroom, waiting to hear the vacuum start up before sneaking into the kitchen to eat breakfast—her plan to stay out of María’s way backfiring when she tripped over the cord or put the coffee maker on and overran the circuit. No, tomorrow Barbara would be in the kitchen with coffee already made when María opened the front door—two mugs on the table—and she would say to María, ¡Buenos días! ¿Cómo está?

Though their days would still be relatively silent, it would be a more companionable sort. María would no longer shake her head at the silly, wasteful things Barbara did like washing and blow-drying her hair every day, or picking out the slimy innards of tomatoes and pushing them to the edge of her plate, or sitting down in the afternoon to read a book on the patio just when María wanted to wipe down the chairs. María would stop going about the house muttering under her breath things that amounted to stupid tourist, and her tsk tsk-ing—because María was not the sort of person to stop trying to help Barbara—would take on a good-natured tone.

When María left each day from now on, Barbara would say, Gracias, María. Muchas gracias. Hasta mañana. And finally, in a few months’ time, when it would be Barbara leaving, Barbara leaving for good, she would say the same thing: Gracias, María. Muchas gracias. Hasta mañana. And María would shake her head—No, No, No—but this time there would be tears in her eyes as she tried to mime that mañana means tomorrow. Barbara would laugh, knowing what it meant—of course, it means tomorrow—and she would say Hasta pronto instead, and María would nod her head, even though this was wrong too. They would not see each other soon; they would probably never see each other again. And she would hug Barbara, not seeming to mind how Barbara’s protruding bones sank into her fleshy middle. Yes, see you soon.

Barbara walked towards María. There was a strong gust of wind behind her, and Barbara could feel the beating of wings against her legs. Startled and afraid, afraid that one or more of the chickens had been playing dead, Barbara let go of them; but instead of taking flight, they fell in a rigid pile at her feet. Barbara stood still as María walked towards her, mumbling something into the phone and then laughing at whatever was said in reply. She hung up and then sighed and shook her head and bent down, wincing as her knees cracked. María gathered the chickens up one by one, brushing and patting the dirt off them, leaving nothing but an offering of dust and a few feathers at Barbara’s feet, and then she carried them into the house.

*****

They’d had a going away party for Barbara at work, a cake with palm trees and a graham cracker crumb beach. “Bon Voyage!”  The writing was crooked, and her boss Michael had forgotten to buy utensils, so they’d had to scavenge what they could from the lunchroom and desk drawers. Some ate with spoons, some knives, some with coffee stir sticks. Some made do with their fingers, licking icing off, sucking it out from beneath their nails.

Barbara had a piece from the very centre of the cake with the capital B and some palm leaves. Maggie sat down beside her. She had a corner piece and she’d somehow managed to get her hands on a fork. “I really shouldn’t,” Maggie said. “I’m watching my weight.”

They’d not spoken since Maggie had found her at the shredder. Barbara had spent her lunch hours at her computer instead, looking up things for her trip, researching where to stay, where to eat, what sites to see. But she didn’t want to tell Maggie about any of that, so when Maggie asked what she’d be doing, Barbara told her, “See some sights, I suppose. Perhaps do some volunteering. I’m winging it.”

“You? Winging it.” Maggie half-heartedly chuckled.

Barbara shrugged, watching Maggie cut down one side of the piece of cake. “I want to be somewhere warm for a change,” Barbara said. She watched the unsupported icing quiver and then fall towards the edge of the plate. “With no snow.”

Barbara didn’t know when she’d started hating winter. It had once been snow angels and hot chocolate with peppermint marshmallows. It was walking home through the park with her friends after school, stepping on the shadows the trees cast, and pretending they could hear the snap of branches beneath their snow-encrusted boots. It had been the shock of putting her foot into a snow bank deeper than she thought, that giddy Oh! as she fell through, the world seeming, for an instant, to collapse beneath her. It was Old Jack Frost nipping at your nose, whipping round trees and bushes, carrying a dusting of snow up, up, up into the air the way Barbara imagined words could be carried too—all the ones she needed to be heard but couldn’t actually say to anyone.

And she’d loved the falling snow, especially the bigger, fluffier, lazier flakes—a freshness she could catch on the tip of her tongue.

Now winter was the grimy, blackened slush of salted roads, the slippery sidewalks that made for treacherous walking. It was scarves and hats and mittens and ankle-length down coats that kept Barbara contained but never really kept her warm. It was resentment, Barbara always shovelling precisely one shovel-width beyond her half of the driveway; her neighbour George—always in a rush—shovelling at least two-shovel widths less, leaving big blobs of snow down the middle that Barbara had to clear. It was the taking off of boots and the putting on of those blue plastic booties that smelled of other people’s feet when she took her father to the doctor’s office; her cheeks flushed with a layer of shiny sweaty embarrassment when she and everyone else in the waiting room saw her father’s big toe sticking out of his sock.

It was arriving too late at the hospital because the roads were slick. It was sitting alone with his body, still wearing her hat and scarf and gloves, half-laughing when she realized this visit wasn’t much different from all her others, with her shivering in the chair while he lay there sleeping. Except now he was dead. Barbara had taken off her gloves and rested her hand on the bed beside his but couldn’t bring herself to touch him, not sure which of them would be the colder.

The ground was too hard to bury him in February, so she had him cremated and left his ashes at the undertaker’s until the spring thaw; the guilt of his being there alone was better than the mortification she would have felt if she’d (clumsy as she was) knocked over the urn and scattered his ashes all over the living room carpet. There was no evidence that he’d ever lived with her, except for his dentures, which were sitting in a glass of water on the dresser in the spare room. When she’d packed up her father’s things, she’d lifted the glass, intending to dump the water out in the bathroom, but the teeth had seemed to chatter. Barbara had set them back down as carefully as she could and hadn’t been able to touch them again since.

What Barbara hated most about winter was the driving, the reduced visibility, the fishtailing of tires, and the carelessness of other people who drove with less caution but more confidence than she did.

On her way to work that November morning—the day Barbara had made her decision about leaving—she lost control of her car. It was the first morning that the temperatures had dropped below freezing, and she’d had to scrape the windshield and then sit in the car with the defrost on long enough for her breath to stop fogging up the window.

She’d driven as cautiously as she always did, but she’d hit a patch of black ice, and the tires slid from asphalt to gravel to grass before she was able to right herself.

When Barbara had gotten to work, she’d sat in her cubicle, not even bothering to take off her coat, her hands still shaking. She wasn’t surprised by the fact that she’d almost gone off the road but that she’d fought so hard not to. She pried open her hands, her frozen fingers cracking and buckling, still bent as if gripping with all their might the curve of the steering wheel.

She held both hands up to the faint heat coming off her computer screen. I need to go somewhere I can thaw, she thought, looking at the wallpaper on her monitor: a beach scene that she’d never bothered to change, people lounging on beach chairs or frolicking in the water, their tanned skin baked by the sun, their feet arched against the nearly unbearable slippery heat of the sand. Somewhere I can melt.

And those first few weeks in Argentina, Barbara had never been so hot. Sweat pooled everywhere. Under her arm pits, behind her knees, all down her neck and back. It slid between her breasts and moistened the bridge of her nose. Whenever she stood up, she had to tug at the hem of her shorts with her thumbs and index fingers as discreetly as she could, trying to loosen the damp, crumpled cotton that had ridden up her thighs. Even her toes sweated, the dirt from the roads sticking to them, the paste of sweat and grime hardening and cracking whenever she went into the air conditioning.

Barbara found ways to cope. She kept out of the sun as much as possible, seeing tourist spots in the morning beneath a parasol she bought from a street vendor, and then resting in her darkened hotel room for most of the afternoon. If there was no air conditioning where she was staying, she’d lie on the floor in her underwear with her head in the bar fridge, a chair barricaded against the door so the maid couldn’t come in and catch her in such a state.

But even in all that heat, there was still something of a chill. She might feel it in any of the countless hotel lobbies she was in. The receptionists’ practiced, chipper tones and topics of conversation had a pleasant but frigid sameness that—no matter how she tried to engage them in conversation—kept her at arm’s-length. It could be found in the overly broad smiles of the tour guides who said Thanks instead of Gracias whenever Barbara tipped them, their grins vanishing as soon as the coins clinked into their palms. And even when she stood on street corners, feeling safe and snug within the crowd, someone behind her would suddenly say something to their companion, the words she couldn’t understand like a persistent draft on the back of her neck; and she’d cross her arms across her chest, her hands slick with sweat as she tried to grip her upper arms and hug herself for warmth.

She decided to abandon her carefully researched itinerary and instead settle in one place. Be part of a community. Have neighbours she could say good morning to and invite over for drinks.

She went to a local internet café and Googled “Mar del Plata” and “house rental.”

Yes, Barbara thought, browsing through pictures of beachfront properties, houses where every entryway was a rounded arch, living rooms painted bright yellows and oranges and blues. That’s the ticket.

After Barbara had been in the house for a couple of weeks, Alejandro, the rental agent who was also María’s nephew, called to make sure everything was to her liking.

Barbara told him everything was fine, though the rattan furniture which she’d found charming when he showed her the house was squeaky and uncomfortable to sit on. And the neighbouring houses were closer than she’d expected; the six-apartment rental property next door, an eyesore of a place with jagged stucco walls, seemed to have a weekly rotation of vacationers, all with wailing children.

“Also,” he said, “María is not here next week. She asked me to tell you she is going home.”

“Home?”

“Where she is from. Tilcara. For the holiday.”

Even though it seemed a bit soon for a holiday, María only having worked for Barbara a couple of weeks, Barbara had said María deserved a holiday, that she worked very hard.

Alejandro laughed and said that she’d misunderstood. “No, for Carnaval,” he explained. “To celebrate. They are burying their devil.”

There was a pause as Barbara heard María’s voice in the background. “She says that you are to come too. There is a van. Plenty of room.”

Barbara said that was very kind but that she would be fine on her own.

“But there will be no one to take care of you she says.”

“I can take care of myself.”

Another pause as Alejandro translated and María replied. There was then some back and forth between them, the voices a bit more muffled than before.

“She says you are coming.”

Barbara protested, but Alejandro said, “I know my aunt, Barbara. This is not an option. This is required.”

It was not what Barbara expected; her only exposure to Carnaval the usual images of samba-dancing girls in bikinis and feathered headdresses, their brows and bodies bedazzled. In Tilcara most of the people wore old, faded t-shirts, with jeans or khaki shorts; their faces, arms, and clothes were stained with a chalky powder. But mixed in among their drabness were men dressed in colourful devil costumes—harlequinesque figures—with strips of orange and blue and yellow and red overlaid with round mirrors encased in a stitched diamond of sequins. There were small gold bells hanging from the edges of their jester-inspired tops and running down the sides of their trousers. Some people played drums, others clanged out the beat on long-necked beer bottles. And there were trumpets, a languid brassy sound that everyone but Barbara seemed able to settle into.

Barbara was on her own, having lost María in the crowd. Barbara couldn’t count the number of times she’d regretted not being more insistent about staying behind. It had taken them a full day to drive to Tilcara, a full 24 hours, sleeping sitting up, washroom stops only. Everyone had brought packed food except Barbara who didn’t know this was what was expected. She ate little and was grateful that everyone else’s chatter, none of which Barbara could understand, drowned out her grumbling belly. And when they had finally arrived at the house of María’s other cousins, Barbara had been briefly introduced, shown to her room, and then forgotten about. She’d waited all evening for someone to call up to her, to knock on the door, to tell her it was time, but no one did, and then it was too late; she’d have arrived when everyone else’s plates were three-quarters cleared, and they’d all have been obligated to sit and watch and wait for her to finish. And this, Barbara thought, feeling both foolish and resentful as she listened to the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses below her window, is how María takes care of me.

A crowd had gathered around a large pile of stones. Flowers sprouted out of the centre, the blossoms entwined with brightly coloured ribbons and streamers, the stems watered with upturned liquor bottles. An elderly woman supported by two young girls stepped forward and left some long leaves at the base. Next, a middle-aged man knelt, his hands pressed against the rocks as others revellers came forward, anointing both him and the pile with wine and beer.

The man standing to Barbara’s left seemed a bit shaky on his feet. She pulled slightly away, not sure if he needed help or if he was just drunk. A small girl ran up to the man and pressed her talc-covered hands onto his belly, giggling as he staggered backwards. He raised his hand, Barbara thought, to strike or swat at the child like some troublesome fly, but instead he blessed her, making a trembling sign of the cross in the air above her head.

María tapped Barbara on the arm. Her hair was caked with talc, and Barbara could see she’d hastily wiped the powder from her glasses—bits of white pushed to the outside edges, smudgy fingerprints across the centre. She gave Barbara a broad smile. She waved her hands like you do when shooing a pesky or reluctant child. Go on, go on, she flapped, urging Barbara forward. Barbara shook her head shyly. María frowned, and Barbara held up her hands, cupping the empty air as if to say, But see? I have nothing to give. María shrugged and went forward herself. She knelt down, kissed the stones, and then rose with her arms held up to the sky, losing herself in the swaying jumble around her.

Someone sprayed the crowd with foam. It floated through the air like big, fat snowflakes, clinging to people’s clothing, their hair, their eyelashes. A flake landed on the inside of Barbara’s wrist. She touched it with her index finger, and it melted, leaving a dry, flaky residue on her skin.

Barbara swallowed hard as she started imagining people from back home here. Her co-workers’ ties and cardigans askew as they danced in circles, punctuating the beat with their raised fists. Her neighbour George, his beer belly stretching the round mirrors on his devil costume into ovals, the reflections distorted like a fun house mirror; his wife Amy trailing behind, wound up in his tail. And there was Maggie, gulping down booze from a bottle raised to her mouth by a man who looked—no, it couldn’t be—but, yes, as she blinked away her tears, Barbara could see it was her father. Open wide, he said, smiling, tipping the bottle and pouring teasingly at first. Maggie’s eager, greedy tongue darting out, demanding more until he was pouring faster than she could swallow. The excess ran out her mouth and down her chin, trickling down the front of her grimy white tank top, down her flimsy peasant skirt, down her sun-kissed legs, the liquid pooling at her feet.

As Barbara tried to move to the centre of the circle, to reach them all, she was grabbed from behind. She cried out as a hand passed across her open mouth, smearing her tongue with a chalky powder that made her cough. Her attacker, a devil with a holy trinity of balloons strung between his horns, slapped her good-naturedly on the back and then moved on. Stop!  She wanted to say, Don’t go!  But the talc had mixed with her saliva, gluing her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

*****

Barbara awoke to a dull rhythmic pounding. María. Through the wall, Barbara could hear her splitting apart the carcasses; each precise cut and snap seeming to mock what would have been Barbara’s clumsy, awkward incisions.

Barbara got out of bed and peeked out the curtain. The backyard was covered white. Barbara thought it was chicken feathers at first, but realized, after hurriedly pushing the curtains back all the way and fumbling with the lock, it—the whiteness—was everywhere. It was still falling.

Barbara went outside.

Yes, yes it was—it had to be—snow. Snow! A light dusting. But still. Snow! Here. Of all places.

Barbara stood in the middle of the yard, snow soaking her socks. She’d forgotten she wasn’t wearing any shoes. She’d have to hang them over the stove later to dry; María would crinkle her nose when she arrived tomorrow to a house smelling of scorched wet wool.

There was a banging on the glass behind her. She turned. María was beckoning from inside. Come in! Come in!

When Barbara shook her head, María stuck her head out the patio door and pantomimed being cold, furiously rubbing her upper arms with her hands and saying, “Brrr,” her Rs taking on an almost metallic ring.

Barbara bent down and gathered some snow, water dripping through the cracks between her fingers as she formed a slushy ball with her bare hands. Barbara held her hand up, jokingly mimed throwing the ball at María, who did that thing she always did, raising her finger and shaking it. Don’t you dare!  Barbara threw it anyway, gently, and María ducked behind the glass door with a startled, “Oh!”

María came outside and stood beside Barbara. Barbara smiled at her. Isn’t it wonderful? María looked around and shrugged. Haven’t you ever seen snow before?

María clucked her tongue when she looked down and saw Barbara wasn’t wearing any shoes. She took the shawl from around her neck, and standing on her tiptoes, wound it round and round Barbara’s head. I’m sorry, Barbara wanted to say. For the chickens. For everything. But she didn’t know the words; she hadn’t written them down in her notebook. She hadn’t realized she’d have anything she needed to apologize for. So instead she said, “Thank you.”

María tied the ends together, her calloused knuckles gently scraping Barbara’s chin. “De nada,” María said, and then went back in the house.

Barbara held her head up to the sky and closed her eyes. She felt each flake on her skin, a light touch on her forehead, her cheeks, her eyelashes, the tip of her nose. Barbara stuck out her tongue, eager for that first taste of salt-flecked snow.

by Helen Rossiter

There is a moment between sleep and wakefulness when anything is possible. You know in that fraction of a second, before your brain clicks into gear, that you are flying or dancing with the stars, or that you are alone in a dark cavern. It’s a fragment of time when the impossible and the implausible might frighten or amuse, but don’t strike you as odd.

So it was when I touched the hand beside mine and thought with a joy I hadn’t felt for months, this is my husband’s hand.

Daylight cracked the night then, and I remembered with a sharp clarity that I had no husband, that the man I once called husband had left me, and that the hand I touched now was that of a stranger. I raised myself on my elbow and looked at him. He was so still I thought at first he might be dead, and then I saw the slightest flutter of his lips, a barely discernible widening and narrowing of his nostrils as he breathed.

What was I to do with a reality like this? At some point, he would wake and ask me questions. Where was he. Who was I. I would have questions of my own too, but for now, in this moment, I wanted to hold the dream that he was mine, that the air between us, with its trace of ice and salt, was ours.

I lay beside him for a few minutes, taking stock of what lay ahead and the fact that he would not sleep forever. Then I slid from the bed and stood on the cold boards before the mirror. I so rarely look at my body any more and my nakedness startled me. My nipples were erect within the brown areolas of heavy breasts, and my stomach was puckered and dimpled. My hair which had once been red—stunningly alight, my husband used to call it—was now fading to grey, and my face bore the furrows of middle age. I looked at the man who slept in my bed, and I was hurt by his youth. I dressed quickly.

*****

He had arrived well past midnight when I was in the middle of dreams. The knocking on my door had woken me and I had gone, drunk with sleep, to let him in.

Foolish, perhaps, in the normal course of things, but we were caught in a storm that had driven in from the west and then stalled, dumping over three feet of snow that cut power and made the roads impassable. And there at my door, under the yellow glare of my flashlight, was a man who looked as close to death as anyone I had ever seen.

He staggered against me and fell into the hallway. I closed the door against the wind and snow and helped him stand, and felt the hardness of his arm beneath my fingers. Ice fell from his body as I led him to my kitchen. I pulled off his coat—a sodden thing heavy with snow—and placed him in a chair, then struggled to take off his boots which were as soaked inside as out. I poured some brandy into a small glass and encouraged him to swallow. He slumped forward in the chair and whispered something I couldn’t catch. His eyes closed.

“No, you mustn’t sleep,” I said, sure that if he did, he wouldn’t wake. I touched his cheek and felt the waxiness of frostbite, and I knew that if I didn’t warm him soon and quickly, he could die there in my kitchen.

“Come,” I said, “I’ll help you, but you have to help me too.” I half carried, half dragged him to my bedroom and propped the flashlight on the dresser. I stripped off his clothes and dried him gently with a towel while spasms shook his body, and he groaned through chattering teeth as I helped him to the bed and covered him with blankets. It would take more than blankets to warm him, so I did the only thing I could with the storm raging outside. I took off my thick nightgown and lay beside him, and wrapped my warm body around his as I urged him not to sleep.

Long after the light from my flashlight had died, his shivering stopped and his breathing became regular and deep; and with my cheek against his shoulder, I felt his skin begin to warm. Curled around his back, I slept too, and dreamed that my husband had returned, that this was my husband’s back against my breasts.

*****

Now, I stood beside the bed and watched him sleep. I memorized the shape of his face, and when I thought I knew him, I picked his wet clothes from the floor. I felt for a wallet— something to tell me his name—but the pockets were empty so I took the clothes to the kitchen and hung them over chair backs to dry. The power was still off and it could be days before the linesmen reached me, but I had an old camp stove for emergencies; and I heated some water and threw in some instant coffee, and shared the concoction between two mugs.

I heard a sound behind me and turned. He was leaning against the door, holding a blanket around his body. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was rough, as if his throat were filled with a hundred tiny pebbles.

“I’ve made coffee,” I said and held the mug out to him.

He shuffled to the nearest chair and struggled with the blanket, keeping it around him while freeing one hand from its folds. “Thank you.” He took the mug and sipped the coffee. I heard him swallow.

“You could have died last night,” I said. The skin on his face was chapped and red, and the mug shook in his hand, but otherwise, he seemed to have escaped the worst ravages of frostbite.

“My car ran off the road.”

“It’s over a mile to the highway. I’m surprised you found your way here.”

He didn’t ask my name or tell me his, but said, “Can I use your phone? I need to call my wife. She’ll be worrying.”

So he had a wife. “The lines are down,” I said, “and I’m afraid the battery on my cell phone is dead. But let me make you something to eat. You must be hungry.” His wife could wait, and I would take care of her husband.

I cracked two eggs and scrambled them over the little stove, and served them to him with buttered bread. Then would have been the time to ask his name and how he found my house in the dark, but instead I said, “Let me find you some clothes.” I left him sitting there and went to my bedroom.

Some of my husband’s clothes still hung in the closet—three shirts that I had given him, a jacket (favourite of mine), and the suit he wore when he married me. A year ago, when he left, I’d been tempted to throw them out or burn them, but to do so meant surrendering to my loss completely. So I’d kept them, burying my face in the smell of him on nights when I couldn’t sleep, or on days when I couldn’t think.

I took the jacket from its hanger, but almost immediately I put it back, loathe to share what little I had left of him. I moved to my side of the closet. I am tall for a woman, and it didn’t take long to find a thick sweater and a pair of sweat pants that had stretched even outside my own proportions. I took them to the kitchen, along with a pair of socks, and placed them on the chair beside him. “These might be more comfortable than draping yourself in a blanket,” I said, “if you don’t mind wearing purple.”

He had barely touched the food on his plate. “What am I going to do?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you’re stuck here until the snowplows clear the roads.”

“Maybe I can walk back to the highway.”

“Your clothes are soaked, and you’ll freeze to death without a coat. So eat now, and get dressed. I’ll be back in a while and we can figure out what to do.”

I walked down the hall to my study and closed the door and sat for ten minutes or so before the pile of term papers on my desk. I had planned to finish marking them today, but now that I had a guest, they could wait.

When I returned to the kitchen, he was already dressed and standing awkwardly against the table. “Does it suit me?” he asked. “This colour?” He was trying to make light of his predicament, I think, to shrug off the discomfort of wearing my clothes.

“You look very handsome,” I said, and meant it. My husband had liked me in purple too, once upon a time.

“Do you have a neighbour I could reach? Someone who might have a phone?”

If I had a close neighbour, I would have told him. I would have offered to go for help myself, but my closest neighbour was on the other side of the highway, a good three miles away. “We could try smoke signals,” I said, but he ignored my attempt at levity and sat down with his head in his hands. I noticed the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck, and I wanted to touch it, to feel it spring beneath my fingers.

“I really need to get a hold of her,” he said. “My wife. She’ll be frantic.” He rubbed his right thumb over his left hand, and I saw he wore no ring.

“Why on earth were you out in this weather?” I asked. “They were warning people not to use the roads.”

“We had an argument.”

“And you walked out?”

He nodded. “Just to calm down. I had no intention of staying out for long.”

“Was it a serious argument?”

He appeared to consider my question for a moment, and made a sound that could have been either assent or dissent.

“I’m sorry, it’s none of my business,” I said.

He looked up then as if he were seeing me differently, as if I were a friend perhaps, or an older relative who could comfort him. “We were arguing because I accused her of cheating on me.”

“And is she?”

“That’s the thing. She says she isn’t, but I don’t know. I want to believe her, I really do.”

“But?”

“We’ve only been married four months.”

“There must have been something that made you suspicious. Or are you just the jealous type?” I know what jealousy is, of the damage it causes.

“There are phone calls, and she takes them in the bedroom and says it’s her mother or her sister. And there’s all these men at school, and I worry that she’ll meet someone smarter or better or …” His voice trailed off as if he felt embarrassed at sharing so much information with a stranger.

“Your wife goes to school?”

“Yes. At Camden.”

My university. I almost said so out loud. “What courses is she taking?”

“Humanities. English, philosophy, medieval history. I’m not sure what else.”

Not that anything else mattered. Medieval history is mine. It’s a small class, with a reputation for tedium. I know the names of all my students. So why didn’t I take this opportunity to ask her name, tell him that I must know her? Perhaps it was because, until that moment, his wife had been unsubstantiated, someone I could pretend existed only in his imagination.

“Are you a student too?”

“No, I was never smart enough to go to university. I work for my father. Construction.”

I looked at his hands again. They seemed too gentle to wield a hammer, to use a saw, to build a house. They were the hands of a thinker or a poet. The hands of a lover. My husband’s hands.

“I think you need to rest,” I said. “And you need to stay warm. There’s nothing we can do until the snowplows get through. There’s my bedroom, or you can go into the living room. There are magazines there, and books. I have some work to do, but it won’t take me long.”

He asked, then, how far we were from the main road and when I thought the snowplows would reach us. I could have given him hope, told him that the snowplows were already on the highway and would probably be at my lane by nightfall—I had caught a flash of distant blue on the underside of cloud, the slow progression of heavy machines. I put my hand on his arm and felt hard muscle and flesh beneath my fingers. “It could be tomorrow,” I said.

Back in my study, I began to go through the student papers on my desk, putting faces to names, trying to picture if this girl or that would be married to the man in my house. Most I discarded as being too plain or too empty headed. And then I picked up Lisa Lindt’s paper and saw her clearly: a dark-haired gamin with huge, brown eyes, and one of the brightest students in my class. Brains and beauty, the sort of girl any man would fall for. I thought of the boy who sat beside her: a tall, uncomfortable youth who didn’t take my course seriously. He whispered things to her that made her smile, and only last week had put an arm around her and pulled her close while I watched, and kissed her when she turned her face to his.

Should I have left my study then, shown my visitor her paper and asked, is this your wife? Could I have mentioned Martin Killen, the boy who sat beside her. Would I have told him, yes, I think your wife is cheating.

I fingered Lisa Lindt’s paper, and smelled a faint perfume like oranges. I remembered that scent now. She’d approached me two or three weeks ago and asked for special dispensation on her upcoming midterm. Was there an emergency, I asked her. No, she said, but she needed to be out of town. Martin Killen stood a few paces behind her, moving his weight from foot to foot, impatient to leave.

“I’m sorry, Miss Lindt,” I said, “but I can’t give you dispensation except in the case of illness or family emergency.”

She rolled her eyes and turned to the boy with a shake of her head. They left, and the smell of oranges lingered for a while, then dissipated as other students came to talk to me.

I pushed her paper to the bottom of the pile and returned to the living room. He was sitting on the couch, hugging my purple sweater around his body.

“Do you have a car?” he asked without looking at me.

“It’s round the back. Stuck there until I can get the snow blower out and clear the driveway. But even then we’ll have to wait until the plows have been.”

“I don’t know what to do.” He looked so forlorn that I wanted to go to him and put my arms around him and comfort him.

“Your wife will survive,” I said, sure of it.

“Perhaps I can clear the driveway for you?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Besides, your coat and boots are still wet. Wait until this evening, at least.”

It’s odd, perhaps, that I still didn’t ask his name, or he mine, but the time for that had passed. Now we were quiet, and he picked up a magazine from the coffee table and thumbed fast through the pages as if his actions could hurry time. I went to the window and watched for glimpses of reflected light from the working plows. They were still hours from my lane.

Finally I broke the silence. “Are you thirsty? I have some fruit juice or I can make more coffee.”

“No.” Then, “Thank you,” as if he suddenly remembered his manners.

“Try to relax. And be patient. The plows will be here eventually.”

I left him with the magazine and a blanket around his shoulders, and went back to my study. I tried to mark papers but my mind wasn’t on them. Instead, I thought of my husband and his betrayal. I thought of Lisa Lindt and Martin Killen, and of the man whose body I had cradled in the night. Finally, I forced myself back to the term papers and finished them all except for one. Miss Lindt’s paper could wait until tomorrow, until I could decide what to do with it.

He was sleeping when I returned to the living room, the open magazine across his chest. I removed it slowly so as not to wake him, then went to the kitchen to see what I could cook up. I hoped that the gas in my little stove would last for at least one more day.

I cleared the table of the morning’s unwashed plates and mugs, and replaced them with fresh silverware and a clean white cloth. And I found two linen napkins and folded them into swans. There was beer and wine and brandy in my pantry, and I selected a bottle of Pinot Noir and dusted off two wine glasses and set them on the table, along with a slab of butter and slices of bread. Then I opened two cans of soup and heated them on the stove.

I touched his face to wake him, and invited him to join me in the kitchen. “It’s dark early,” I said, “so let’s eat while we can still see.” Outside, the underbelly of heavy clouds caught and held the lights from the snowplow. It was already at the start of my lane and would be here in less than half an hour.

I pulled down the blinds and gave him the chair with its back towards the window. He sat down and his elbow knocked his napkin to the floor, where it unfolded. He tried to restore the swan, but when he had finished, it looked more like a turtle.

I laughed. “I thought you worked in construction.”

“Give me some wood and a hammer and nails, and I’ll build you a boat,” he said. “I’m just not good with birds. Or women, apparently.”

I turned the conversation to other things, making jokes—in spite of my rather sour demeanor, I can be very funny when I try—and had him smiling as I poured the soup between two bowls. I lit candles and placed them in the middle of the table. “Let’s make the most of it.” I poured the wine and lifted my glass in a toast. “To snow and stormy weather,” I said.

He raised his glass but said nothing. His face was contoured in shadow and in the flickering candlelight had lost its youth. He could have been my husband sitting there.

*****

It had been a day much like this, a little earlier in the season, but with snow already falling and promising to block roads and cut us from the highway. We hadn’t spoken much since I returned from work, and he exuded an uneasiness that worried me. Normally we would read the paper together before eating, or share humorous anecdotes about our day. He was a journalist and often had stories to tell but not now. Now he sat silent on the couch, flicking through the channels on the television as if anticipating bad breaking news.

I put a hand on his forehead to feel for a fever. “Are you sick?” I asked.

“No. No. Just tired.”

I kissed the top of his head and told him to relax, and went into the kitchen. I made his favourite dinner: seared scallops with buttered asparagus, and chocolate lava cakes warmed in the oven. I lit candles and poured the wine and called him to join me. He sat opposite me, but couldn’t or wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“What do you mean? Do what?” The words were someone else’s, the voice that slipped between my lips not mine.

“There’s someone else,” he said. He played with the wedding band on his finger. Candlelight caught its facets so that sparks of light reflected off his face.

I swallowed some wine and felt it burn in my throat. I wouldn’t believe him, and I asked him, teasingly, if she was prettier than me, younger and smarter. He didn’t answer, refused still to look at me.

As the truth settled around us, I asked him if he was in love with her.

“Very much,” he said. And quietly, “I have to be with her.”

I reached across the table and gripped his hands. “You need to be with me,” I said. “No one else can love you the way I do.”

He pushed my hands away and stood, knocking over his chair. I listened from the kitchen while he went to the bedroom, while the untouched meal grew cold on the table and the candles spluttered and dripped wax on the white cloth. There was the sound of drawers closing, of the closet door swinging on its hinges, of a bag being zippered. He came back to me for the last time and gently wiped the tears from my eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

I have wondered often, if I’d kept him for a few more hours, until the snow blocked his escape, could I have convinced him to stay, or would he have left regardless, taken his bag and walked through the snow until he reached the highway, risking frostbite or worse.

But the roads were still passable, and he took his car while I stood at the window and watched while the snow covered his tracks. I found his wedding band later, tucked behind the jewellery box on my dresser.

*****

Now I looked across the table at a man who was not my husband and hoped he couldn’t see the ache at the corners of my mouth.

“You don’t wear a wedding ring,” I said.

“I threw it at her,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that. It was stupid.”

“Tell me about her,” I said. “Is she pretty?” Maybe I was wrong and his wife was not Lisa Lindt, but one of the others. Mousy-haired Veronica who sat in the front, timid Julia or coy Eloise—I knew them all and the games they played. This was the time I should have asked his wife’s name. Instead, I said, “Are you in love with her?”

“Yes. Very much.” He was silent for a moment, touching the pale, empty circle on his finger. Then, “Are you married?”

“I was,” I said. “My husband cheated on me.”

“So you understand,” he said. “How much it hurts.”

Was he expecting me to offer him platitudes about love conquering all? Did he hope that I’d encourage him to confront his wife and demand the truth? Somewhere across the country, my husband had made a new life for himself with a woman whose name I refused to say out loud. Should I tell him that?

“Finish your soup while it’s hot,” I said.

I could hear the snowplow now, less than five minutes away. He heard it too, because he twisted in his chair to look behind him at the window. His clothes, strung over the chair backs where I had placed them last night, were still damp; and I wanted to tell him he should wait another day, give his clothes time to dry completely, but he was impatient and pushed himself away from the table. He took his shirt and jeans and held them against him, against my purple sweater.

He looked at me with gratitude and relief and said, “I don’t even know your name.”

The plow’s lights shot arcs of blue through a gap in the blind, and I picked up my glass and drank my wine.

by Gary Thomson

The Chester Billings parkette gathered Clara Knox and her friends many summer afternoons when the companions were between engagements. That was Louella Dickens’ term — engagements — for part time work that paid little, and ended soon after it began. Clara was watching two gulls squabble around an overfull rubbish bin. She bristled when Richie O’Brien nodded towards her cigarets. “Give us a smoke, Clara? I’ll pay you back next weekend.” When pigs wear bow ties, Clara thought. To extend her smoking needs over several days, Clara took care when she left the parkette to leave the open packet with Ayaaz Mahmood who owned the convenience store across the road. He stowed it behind his cash counter in a plastic hold-all with his stapler and a topless ballpoint pen. The surrender of her cigarets was a moral aid towards eventually quitting.

She was still scratchy with resentment when Mr. Cross announced the imminent arrival of the travelling organ grinder. “He’s of the gypsy persuasion, from the mountains of Roumania, I’d venture. But far from Dracula’s castle.” His audience listened with silent caution: they knew something of Mr. Cross’s longago world travels.

Doris Flood harrumphed, and repositioned her immense body along the park bench. Beside her Louella Dickens sipped from her takeaway coffee cup. “How are you . . . persuaded . . . to be a gypsy, Mr. Cross?” Immediately she regretted the question. Louella always said that Mr. Cross could turn the simplest query into a sermon.

Mr. Cross brushed at a stain on his shirt front, and for a time nothing more was said of the music man. Mrs. Witherall plunged a frail hand into her sewing bag and tried toremember what item of knitting she would find there. Vaguely she recalled a gypsy from an old movie: thick moustache, embroidered shirt, flinty stare. The name Bela Lugosi sounded in her head. Louella saw herself at next Wednesday’s bingo, seated at her lucky bench, three rows removed from the caller’s podium. Clara closed her eyes towards the afternoon sun, shut her mind to the squalling gulls and Richie’s cajolery.

The parkette was an oasis of tranquility huddled beside a broad, sluggish river. Three worn benches sat open for tired strollers. A children’s play area offered two swings (one missing its restraining belt), a red slide, and a sandbox holding a half-buried toy tractor. Mature pine trees littered the ground with brittle cones. Afternoon shadows from Ayaaz’s store, the Sunshine Superette, reached towards the swings.

Mr. Cross went on, “I saw a poster of the music man, in Wellman’s bookstore. Dressed in red tunic and green pantaloons. Impressive figure indeed.”

“Not much like this Dracula dude,” said Richie. He knew the sermon had begun; he pulled on his cigaret.

Mr. Cross let the comment pass. “His trained monkey was secured to the hurdy-gurdy with a leather leash. Devils in disguise they are, with their pillbox hats and waistcoats. They’ll pilfer the coin straight from your pocket.”

Clara savoured the warmth over her face and heard only a droning from Mr. Cross. Doris Flood heard a few details, Louella even fewer. It was hard to listen to Mr. Cross when he rattled on about these exotic encounters. They did listen, though, when he spoke of new government benefits, and how to apply for them; or when he told of a woman beaten up not far from here. You listened then, for the full story.

Weekday mornings, Clara walked from her rooming house on a tree-lined avenue to her work in a late Victorian industrial building that now served as a glove factory. She was a capable employee, and her line supervisor spoke well of her stitching and sorting skills. Clara loved the smell of machine oil and new leather and the sense of independence her position gave her. Frizzy-haired and bespectacled, Clara has been working and living on her own since she was eighteen, the year after her father sent home a note from a business trip to Winnipeg stating he would not be returning to the family house. Her mother, always frail and excitable, explained to Clara through a rush of nerves, and soon became a shrunken, vodka-drinking night wanderer in the house.

If Clara showed good work habits at Regent Gloves for another four months, she would be eligible for full-time employment, which meant seniority and paid insurance benefits. She could say goodbye to shopping at Goodwill, and have a little extra money for a new summer frock to lift her spirits. She was reduced to a shortened schedule—two, sometimes three days per week—when Mr. Cross spoke of the gypsy musician and the pipe band concert. She knew the factory was waiting on a government order of dress gloves for the Mounties that would get her a call back to full-time work.

Doris Flood asked Mr. Cross if the band was the sort that moved in lines and squares, like at halftime on telly. “That’s sparkly music. Makes you want to step around the room, smart-like.” Doris easily offered amusements from her past to the companions. But a grey sorrow hung over her present behaviours. “I’m too fat and can’t get around like I used to,” she said. “Knees always aching . . . and it’s making my liver tired.”

“Maybe you’ll hear the music again, Doris.” said Mr. Cross. “We might all go. Make a picnic, share in the monkey’s antics. Enjoy a fun afternoon.”

No one answered Mr. Cross. They knew he was thinking through details of transportation, food sharing, and seating for the women.

*****

Clara walked across the street to the Sunshine Superette, and stepped inside, into the cool air. At the front counter Ayaaz was restocking a plastic flex board with rows of lottery tickets. He secured the ticket board beneath a glass cover, and when Clara handed him her cigaret packet, he said, “When can I throw these in the rubbish bin?”

“Soon, if Richie keeps playing the charity case.”

“He knows a kindly soul when he sees one,” Ayaaz said.

Clara had been making small purchases of instant coffee, bread, cigarets, and menthol cough drops from Ayaaz for about a half-dozen years now. She always asked after Ayaaz’s wife, and their son and his wife who worked in the oil patch in Alberta. In turn, she brought to Ayaaz the small triumphs and worries and brief health reports of her friends. She told him of Richie’s sore back from lifting a table on his most recent job. She spoke gently of Mrs. Witherall’s declining memory. These were Clara’s reality patches set beside the fantasy board of the lottery tickets. “Mr. Cross wants us to see a performing monkey. Claims it’ll be the highlight of our summer.”

“I’ve never seen a dancing monkey,” Ayaaz said. “But I do see a few shifty birds in here through a week, working their routines. Sticky fingers and attitudes—all of them.”

“My friend Amy Holland had a dancing ballerina, when we were kids,” Clara said. “It came out of a little house, on the hour. Two fingers of her left hand were missing and the glass door wouldn’t shut when she finished her turns.” Sometimes the music and the ballerina’s smiling porcelain face sprang unbidden from Clara’s memory. She hoped one day to find a similar working version in the Goodwill shop. “That little doll was part of Amy’s family. She was lucky that way.”

Ayaaz smiled. “I wish you’d leave off these killer sticks, Clara.”

“And have Richie’s withdrawal on my conscience as well?”

*****

Clara walked from Ayaaz’s Superette along the river walkway for about half a mile. The afternoon sun warmed her shoulders. She watched the current nudge a shopping cart against a submerged rock. What she would like to do is stash one of those novelty cigarets in her packet, the kind that never light. Offer it to Richie next time he came cadging a smoke. Watch his mouth pull real hard, and his puzzled face wondering: what the hell. She’d tell him, Ooopps, practical joker on the packing line, Richie.

Smiling, she turned onto Queen Street, and into the shade of mature maple trees. She stopped beside a cardboard box set at the end of the drive to house number 239. Black lettering—“FREE”— covered one side of the box. Clara rummaged through a stack of jigsaw puzzles, wool hats, and wooden spoons. Beneath the clutter her fingers closed around a soft, nubbly fabric. Clara pulled a doll out of the box, and examined it.

The doll’s flat pug face was shaped from linen, stained along the right cheek. Two brown socks stuffed with rags made limp arms. Her left eye, a pale green button, dangled towards the red embroidery stitching of her mouth. Clara saw in the doll’s tormented face a mute plea for rescue. “We’re a lot alike, aren’t we?” she said. “Worn around the edges, and some days too much alone. Won’t a good dollop of Murphy’s soap clean you up.”

She looked into the shadowy doorway. Clara wondered, who was the little girl in there who had tended the doll after a tumble, or wiped the imaginary tears from her green-button eyes? That was Amy Holland’s favourite pastime, with her ballerina doll. Clara recalled Amy wagging her middle finger to coax the doll back into her glass house when the music and chimes had stopped. “She’ll be safe and content there,” Amy said. “Where she belongs.”

Clara cradled the doll in her left hand and continued her walk along Queen Street. We’ll go round to Mrs. Witherall’s, now, she thought. Ask her to knit you a bright headband. Make you feel new and alive again.

*****

On the following Saturday the companions gathered in the parkette under a leaden sky that threatened rain. Mr. Cross chewed on a black Smith’s cough drop, and rattled on about summer being a terrible time to be chasing after a cold. Mrs. Witherall was knitting a headband for Clara’s doll, green with gold borders. Her watery eyes gleamed. Louella Dickens opened her worn handbag and pulled forth a stuffed envelope. “This week my bingo chips fell into place,” she announced. “So, in celebration . . . a gift for you all.” She fanned a cluster of tickets in her right hand.

“What surprise is this, Louella?” asked Mr. Cross.

“For the concert, Mr. Cross. What you was telling us about last week.”

“This is a trick,” said Doris Flood. “It’s Richie ‘as put you up to it.”

Louella offered up a ticket for inspection. “Read it, Mr. Cross. Look here, plain as your finger. ‘The Celtic Connection. Rayman Park. Saturday 28 July 2:00 pm.’ And see this: ‘Special guest . . . Mr. Liberty Crocker . . . and Bagwell . . . in Performance.’” She set her mouth in confirmation. “It’s your gypsy music man and his monkey.” She cast a scornful look at Doris, who turned her head away. Then Louella peeled individual tickets from the bundle and passed one into each extended hand.

Mr. Cross worked his cough drop under his tongue. “Louella, this is a magnanimous gesture, surely.” He studied the expectant faces. “Of course we’ll go. A picnic lunch and music . . . we’ll have the time of our lives.” He looked at Louella. “Shall I hold the tickets for the interim? Guard against loss or misadventure.” He suspected that Richie would resell his ticket in an instant, and that Mrs. Witherall might misplace hers.

“If you wish, Mr. Cross,” Louella said. She was thinking of her summer dresses, would she wear the cute yellow floral one or the snazzy lime-green number with the shiny white belt.

*****

On the appointed day Mr. Cross situated the companions on a grassy knoll under the shade of a patriarchal willow tree. They looked onto the bandstand, about fifty yards away. He settled Mrs. Witherall into the folding chair with the high back and sloping leg rest. She checked her pattern of stitches in her knitting, and hummed a melody that was running in her head. “You rest and finish a row or two,” Mr. Cross said. “We’ll have you fed in short order.” Doris explained to him Richie’s absence: a leg of a sofa that he was moving had landed on his foot, and he could barely walk.

Clara wrapped a spare Food City bag around her little Orphan Annie. That was Clara’s name for the found rag doll from her favourite Saturday comic strip. Annie with big round eyes and frizzy hair. And over her shoulder, her dog Sandy, looking protective and quizzical. You’re an orphan no more, Clara thought. You’ll hold your head high with your new headband. She set Annie along a chair leg. Then she helped Louella to unpack the picnic hampers. “Your new frock looks like cool sherbet,” Clara said.

****

On schedule, the mayor jounced onto the stage. He welcomed the crowd and urged them to support today’s sponsors. “Now, sit back, and enjoy the rousing music of the Knightsbridge Drum and Pipe Band.”

Clara never gave much thought to the music that played on the mantel radio in her small apartment. Mostly it hovered in the background, irrelevant and forgettable. But here, as the reedy moan of bagpipes spread along the hill, she knew this music had its own power and mystery. The hairs along her forearms and neck had risen. The notes wailed and groaned, paused and then lifted towards distant hills. There was sighing of wind over water. There was dark moss over weathered gravestones; and in her mind the pine trees in the parkette brooded over the empty sandbox. It was a magical sound that came to her from another, faraway world.

Louella was passing around a platter of Strub’s dill pickles when the MC announced the feature attraction: “Now, ladies and gentleman, all the way from a rousing performance at Niagara’s Summerfest . . . Mr. Liberty Crocker . . . and his dancing monkey, Bagwell.”

The music man was pushing his barrel organ to centre stage and smiling towards his audience. The instrument gleamed under new shellac and freshly painted gold and red roses that curled along its sides. Clara admired his green silk pantaloons and billowing white linen shirt. She laughed when Crocker turned his hand crank to begin a tinny waltz tune, and suddenly the monkey poked his head out of an opening on top of the organ.

Clara pulled Annie out of the plastic bag, and set the doll astraddle her left leg. Clara had cleaned Annie’s face and stitched the tangled hair. With her button eye repaired, she could look on and enjoy the show.

The monkey adjusted the brim of his tan fedora, and then pulled himself onto the organ platform. Swaying to the music, he doffed his fedora and bowed to the crowd.

Crocker motioned Bagwell forward, then from a small wicker basket he filled Bagwell’s hands with coloured lollipops. Bagwell lobbed the candies towards squealing children and smiling adults.

As the music selections from the hurdy-gurdy changed, so too did the games: from juggling with yellow, red and black beanbags to toss-and-catch with the Frisbee, where Bagwell followed each expert catch with a fluid backflip. He peeled a banana and tossed the skin slyly behind Crocker, who staged a dramatic slip and timely recovery. Bagwell shrieked in fake laughter.

Shortly after, Crocker bowed to his audience, and extended his hand to Bagwell. Together they left the stage on a wave of applause.

*****

After the concert Mr. Cross ushered his riders to the car. He told Doris to leave the car radio off, that he wanted to hold the pipers’ music in his head. Mrs. Witherall said that Richie’d be sorry he missed the show, and free at that. Clara asked Mr. Cross to drop her at the Sunshine Superette, where she had a couple of items to buy. In this nice weather she preferred the walk home.

She found Ayaaz down by the magazine racks. He was tidying a bundle of community newspapers for display along wire shelving. She wanted to tell Ayaaz about the dancing monkey, that it did have sticky fingers, but only for Frisbees and lollipops, not for stolen candy bars. She wanted to share with him the wonder of the strange, compelling flight away from herself that the pipers’ music prompted.

She would try to explain the bond between the gypsy man and his animal friend, how they were joined by time and trust and a mutual dependence. What would happen when one of them was too old to perform, she wondered. Would they each retreat into memory to keep the games and music fresh and lively.

But Ayaaz never asked about the concert. He was bubbly with news from his son and daughter-in-law. “Their first baby coming soon,” he said. “Now my wife is all over the place, buying baby clothes, and searching out nursery toys. Next stop—the poor house.”

Clara glanced at the front page of the newspaper that Ayaaz was arranging into a neat pile. A young couple embraced beneath a headline: “Dance-a-thon for Cancer a Huggable Hit.” “Will you be going out there to live, be near your new family?” she asked.

Ayaaz shook his head. “This is our home now.” He lifted the newspapers onto the shelving. “And what young couple wants parents fussing about to see if they’re raising properly the children. No . . . too much I would miss you and your friends.”

Clara passed along her congratulations to the expectant parents. She bought a carton of orange juice and a packet of biscuits. Ayaaz asked her if she had stopped smoking. Clara shook her head. He said, “One day you will be ready. You see.”

None of the companions, who lounged in the parkette on a summer evening or bundled against the creeping chill of autumn afternoons, spoke of Bagwell or the organ grinder again. Other events or issues called for their attention: Mrs. Witherall’s arthritic hands, Richie’s new job as parking lot attendant, and the ominous mention of a peeping Tom over on Albion Street. Clara’s permanent placement at the glove factory came through on the same day her section completed the order for the Mountie dress gloves. She imagined a tall RCMP officer in Ottawa wearing a pair against the chill, grateful for their warmth. “We hope you’ll be with us a long time, Ms. Knox,” said her supervisor.

As autumn waned, the last of the dry leaves fell onto the walkways of the parkette. Clara and Annie sat on a weathered bench, and gazed along the river. Clara hummed a few remembered phrases of the tinny waltzes, and again she saw Bagwell’s face crinkle as he schemed his mischief on Crocker. She thought that it might be a grand thing to wander far away and bring amusement and pleasure to people. Even now those two might be riding through mountain villages in a painted cart drawn by a plodding donkey, home at last in the land of the gypsies. She coaxed Annie along her leg to rest against her stomach. The gesture reminded her of Amy Holland, tucking her ballerina doll into its glass house. “Where do people go when the music and chimes have stopped,” she said to Annie.

The gypsy’s waltzes fled before the haunting notes of the Knightsbridge pipers. The hair on her arms tingled with excitement once again. She knew that she would wait out her days here, keeping watch over Mrs. Witherall and urging Ayaaz for updates on his new grandchild. She danced Annie along her legs. “We’ll make our own mischief, you and me. Start by giving Richie my remaining cigarets. Include a trick unlightable one. Watch him dance around that surprise.” She chuckled, and held Annie aloft.

The westering sun cast lengthy shadows from the Sunshine Superette over the bench, broad silky bands that held them both warmly.

by Paula Dunning

Rachel is driving the riding mower back and forth across the lawn, the first mowing of the season. It’s springtime-cool—she’s wearing a light jacket, and a bright red scarf holds back her greying curls—but the midday sun is warm on her back. As she backs up to manoeuver around the hawthorn bush, she glances across the expanse of green to the house, where the rose bushes beside the deck are just putting out leaves. When she and Tom moved onto this farm forty years ago, a small yard surrounded the house. Back then, she pushed an old mower that spewed out black smoke while the kids piled up the clippings to make hay for toy cows.

Now, the lawn is huge, estate-like. As she circles around, she thinks about how each part was added. First, they carved a mammoth garden plot out of an adjacent field; as the garden gradually shrank to a manageable size, they began mowing around the edges. Then, they fenced in an area near the house for their daughter’s horse; when the horse moved on to another child on another farm, they started mowing that chunk too, since they’d become used to seeing it chewed down. Twenty-five years ago, when they sold the last of their cattle, the barnyard next to the house started growing unsightly weeds, so they mowed that. Eventually, they had to tear down the old barn itself, and that space needed to be tidied up too. Now, they spend three hours on a riding lawnmower every week from May to October. Except for the mowing, they rarely step onto the grass. Their lawn has become an environmentally embarrassing objet d’art in an ever-expanding frame.

“A non-mow yard, that’s what I want,” says Rachel later, propping her feet up on the deck railing and letting her red scarf blow free in the early evening breeze. She’s sipping her evening glass of wine. White, chilled. Tom’s having a beer. He nods. She imagines spring daffodils among birch clumps, giving way to wildflowers and a few mowed paths into the woods.

Three weeks ago, a man with a briefcase came to tell Rachel and Tom what their home of forty years was worth. He used a tape measure and a questionnaire, checked out the pipes and the heating system, looked for moulds and water damage. He didn’t gaze out the kitchen windows at the greening hill or look for migrating ducks on the river that runs along the edge of the farm. He went away, studied his findings, checked on what other people’s homes have sold for, and came up with a number.

Lots of their friends are doing it, calling it downsizing—though the size is not always smaller—but until now, Rachel and Tom have resisted. Now, following some instinct they can’t identify, they’ve decided it’s time. “We’ll do it while we’re still fit and healthy, while it can still be an adventure,” says Tom.

They have been married for forty-five years. A vanishing breed, they often say, almost extinct, noting how many of their friends have separated and moved on to second, even third, marriages. It hasn’t been easy. For many years—raising their three children, managing a small farm, trying to juggle careers to keep the farm going—their marriage remained intact due more to the combined forces of inertia and insecurity than to a great shared affection. But that was then. Now, they’re moving into later years more or less in sync, grateful for whatever forces kept them together.

“I don’t know if I feel like an adventure,” says Rachel. “I’m more a nester. I need to have a home.” She draws a shaky breath. “It doesn’t have to be this one, I know. But it’s hard to imagine any other.”

She looks across the fields, familiar expanses of green with their own names—the far field, the red clover field, the barn field—and wonders, as she has been wondering often, what makes a home? Bricks and mortar? Overflowing bookshelves and too many sets of dishes? Tea and the sympathy of friends? A soft place to land?

It’s the landing that’s at the root of all this, she thinks. Not knowing when or where it will be. Not knowing the best way to make it soft. Will it be an emergency landing on rough terrain, no time to search for a landing strip? Will it be a slow, gradual descent, ending softly at a predetermined location? Or will it be a drop through turbulence, out of fuel, a bounce, a gasp, followed by what? Relief? A parachute unfurling just in time?

Rachel is a writer. She begins every day sitting in front of her laptop, hoping for inspiration. You’re not supposed to wait for the muse; she knows that, and she tries not to. Show up at your desk every day so you’re ready and waiting if the muse happens by. So, she always writes something. But she’s impatient, and when inspiration fails to materialize in the form of coherent ideas and words on the screen, she finds herself thinking it may be lurking on Facebook, in the telephone voice of a friend, or in Tom’s studio, where she often goes to share her frustration.

Tom is an artist. She thinks he’s probably a better artist than she is a writer. He’s more successful, at least, if getting attention and selling stuff is the measure. He’s also more persistent. He never waits for the muse. He doesn’t actually believe in muses.

Writer and painter are their late-life personas, created in their sixties to carry them gracefully from their professional lives into retirement. At the moment, it’s not feeling very graceful to Rachel, who agonizes over the passing years, the shortening horizon, the pressure to prepare for the threat of infirmity.

With the man’s numbers in hand, they’ve started looking at real estate in the city. I need a big kitchen, Rachel says, and a room to write in. I need a studio, Tom says. They both want a view, trees, privacy, places to walk, and high-speed Internet. They hate to admit how important high-speed Internet is, but after years of fiddling with satellite dishes in the country, it’s one of the big draws of city life. They don’t mention this to their country friends and neighbours, who will see them as traitors to the simplicity they all pretend to embrace.

The house, says Tom, should be a single floor. Or at least have a bedroom on the main floor. Just in case. Rachel agrees. He is on his way to play tennis. She is returning from her daily walk. They’re having trouble imagining the unimaginable. Immobility. Fragility. Aloneness.

That evening, Rachel heads upstairs to take a bath. She keeps the hot water dribbling in, lets the excess seep out the overflow, and leans against the gently sloping porcelain back of the old claw-foot tub. On the other side of the window at the foot-end, the elm tree is putting out its spring growth. Nobody would put a window level with the bathtub anymore—for fear of tree-climbing perverts, she supposes, and she snorts at the thought as she looks down at her sagging breasts and bulging belly.

Padding down the stairs, wrapped in a towel and leaving wet footprints on the oak steps, she tells Tom she would need a bathroom with an old iron, claw-foot tub and a view. He scrunches up his brow the way he does when he thinks she’s being silly and says the thing about that bathtub is, it would be hard to get into if you were frail.

“When you’re frail, you mean?” she says.

“Well, you never know,” he says.

“So, I’m supposed to buy one of those walk-in tubs on TV? In case I’m frail?” She’s not sure where her anger is coming from.

Rachel has decided not to plant a vegetable garden this year. She can’t bear the thought of tucking each row in for the last time. Of looking across the May-green fields at the hill with its kaleidoscope of spring greens. Of sitting back on her haunches to watch the circling hawks. There will be so many goodbyes. Out of long habit, she pulls the wheelbarrow out of the garden shed, pushes it through the muddy ditch leaving a tire mark in the grass, and begins pruning back the rose bushes, their thorns drawing blood on her forearm. The garlic has poked through the winter mulch, so she rakes that off to examine the shoots—dark green at the top, pale where the mulch has covered them. I could probably plant some lettuce now, she thinks, without thinking. A bit of spinach. Chard. A few onions. Not a real vegetable garden. Just a few things. Maybe some tomatoes, later. And carrots.

At supper that night she says, “I think I would need space for a vegetable garden. Just a small one.”

Every day, Rachel walks along the river for a mile and a half before turning back. On one side, she watches the river make its brown, sluggish way to the bay and notices how, over many years, tag alders have grown up along the shore; on the other, she looks at the fields and remembers sweltering days on hay wagons, dreamy days ploughing and harrowing, children carrying pitchers of water and eggnog to the tired crew. This is what home is, she thinks. Memories.

She covers the three miles in fifty-five minutes. She checks her time every day, making sure she’s not slowing down, which would be a sign of impending frailty. Sometimes it’s fifty minutes, which makes her feel strong and young. Sometimes it’s an hour, which makes her worry and pick up her pace the next day. Lately, it’s been an hour more often than she likes.

In forty years, Rachel hasn’t learned the names of the resident ducks—never mind those who stop briefly during migration—but she’s always glad to see them back, glad to see them emerge from the river’s edge with their clutch of ducklings, glad to watch the thick stick on the shoreline turn into a heron and rise awkwardly skyward as she approaches on foot. Once she saw a swan floating down the river. She has decided to become a birder, though she’s not quite sure how to start and wonders if her lack of interest during her first six decades might suggest a deficiency in the intellectual curiosity department, something she’s suspected on and off all her life. Still, she now carries binoculars on her daily walks, even though stopping to look at birds messes up her time-keeping.

She is clinging to the normalcy of it all, afraid to look too far beyond this moment, these memories. She sometimes feels that her very self depends on the leash holding her to this home. And now, that leash has shrunk to a mere thread, one that becomes thinner every time the realtor phones with another house to view.

Needy. That’s how the realtor describes them, only half-joking, after they’ve turned down yet another home that doesn’t meet their long list of criteria. In the end, though, the change happens quickly. The house is not perfect, but it’s close enough and they have tired of the process. Their son, Greg, buys the farm and helps them pack up, sell, or dispose of the accumulations of a lifetime.

The new house has a large living room with a vaulted ceiling and French doors opening onto a spacious deck overlooking a small, enclosed yard—not the expanse of trees they’d imagined but green enough, with space for a small garden, and quiet. The kitchen is smaller than Rachel had hoped for, but her study window looks out on a tree. She enjoys watching the chickadees and grosbeaks at the feeder, but she misses the hawks she watched soaring across the fields from her old study window. The new bathtub is shallow and uncomfortable; mostly she takes showers. Tom sets up a study in the third bedroom and his studio in the basement. They both love the high-speed Internet.

They carry on their lives as they had before the move. Almost. She writes, submits, waits, resubmits, and keeps writing. Occasionally, she publishes an essay or a short story in one of those quirky magazines no one she knows reads—which is fine with her, because those are the people she’s writing about. He spends most of his time painting, and travelling to local shows where he often sells a few paintings, but never enough to keep the inventory from building up, so the walls are filled with his art. They share quiet moments over morning coffee and evening wine—companionable, rarely passionate, more likely to be enflamed by global crises than carnal desire.

Tom has started going to the gym, something he’d never done before. Rachel still walks when weather permits, though she misses the level riverside road. “I think a city mile must be longer than a country mile,” she says when she returns after more than an hour. “I can’t keep up my old pace. It must be the hills. Or maybe my watch is off. It’s certainly not ducks on the river!”

Most of the time, she manages to convince herself that they’ve made the right decision to leave the old farmhouse. Life is easier now, and she has built a wall between the past and the present with a locked door she opens only occasionally with a well-hidden key.

Greg has moved into their old house and replaced the claw-foot tub with a Jacuzzi. His wife, Caroline, put the old tub in the front yard and has planted it with petunias and nasturtiums that splash over the sides like a Crayola bubble bath. Meanwhile, Rachel’s old garden has grown up in weeds. When she allows herself to mourn aloud about the tasteless and shabby condition of their home, Tom reminds her that it is no longer theirs, as if she needs reminding. When they go to their son’s house for supper—which is rare—Rachel can’t find the cutlery, and the toilet water is blue. For some reason, the blue toilet water bothers her more than the overgrown gardens or the chipped tiles on the kitchen counter.

“It’s not good for the septic system,” she says to Caroline, and Tom glares at her.

“Just saying,” she mutters.

She always leaves with tears in her eyes, and it’s a relief to walk back through the wall into the present, where the toilet water is clear, the knives and forks are in their proper places.

One night, after such a visit, Rachel dreams she is flying a red kite on the field beside the river. Then, she becomes the kite and soars over the landscape of her life—the house, which is both her house and not her house, with porches in the wrong places and paint peeling around the windows; the vegetable garden, in neat rows of green; the old barn, gone these twenty years, standing tall and straight; cattle milling about, drinking water from an old claw-foot bathtub. As she soars closer to the hill, she looks down on the tiny figure of Tom who is holding the kite string taut against the power of the wind. He lifts his hand to wave to her and releases the string. Slowly, the wind pulls her over the hill and out of the dream.

When she wakes, Rachel stares at the ceiling of her new bedroom, where a fan turns slowly, barely visible in the dark, its rotations creating the faintest breeze in the night. Tom is lying beside her, snoring softly. He shifts, as though responding to her wakefulness. The clock radio on Tom’s side of the bed reads three-thirty. Neither night, nor morning. With the dream still fresh on her mind, Rachel pulls back the covers and slips out of bed, trying not to jostle either Tom or the memory of flying high and free over the fields and hills that, for the moment, are hers again. She wanders into the kitchen for a glass of water, wondering where her kite-self was drifting when the dream left her, where she landed, and why Tom released the string.

That morning, Greg phones. “Mom, you left your red scarf here yesterday. Annie noticed it way out on the field, stuck to a thistle. Must have blown there. I didn’t think it was that windy. We’ll hang on to it for you.”

Rachel thanks him and tells him to thank six-year-old Annie. Puzzled, she goes to her scarf drawer where her only red scarf is neatly folded halfway down the pile. She shrugs off a fleeting, uneasy feeling—a splash of red in the wind—and phones Greg back.

“That scarf. It’s not mine.”

Later in the day, she returns from her walk, out of breath, to a message from the doctor’s office: “Please call.” She’d been tired, depressed, slower to adjust to the move than she’d expected. Get a check-up, Tom had said, just to be sure. The doctor wants to see her first thing tomorrow morning, says the receptionist, to discuss the results of her blood work.

“Is something the matter?” Rachel asks, forcing the words through a lump that has moved rapidly from her stomach to her throat.

“The doctor wants to discuss the results,” the anonymous and now-ominous voice repeats.

That night, she barely sleeps, and when she does, she dreams of white sheets blowing in the wind and vials of black-red blood spilling onto the kitchen floor.

Tom accompanies her to the doctor’s office, where the receptionist ushers them into an office with a large oak desk and two vinyl-upholstered chairs. Rachel’s heart is pounding. Her breath is rapid and shallow. Tom takes her hand. After a few minutes, the doctor enters, his white coat unbuttoned, a file folder in his hands. He shakes their hands, smiles, sits down behind the desk, and looks directly at Rachel.

“We have found some irregularities in your blood work that probably explain the way you’ve been feeling, Rachel,” he says. He hesitates and looks towards the window. Rachel hears herself inhale.

“We will need to confirm the diagnosis with further tests, but it looks like you are suffering from an aggressive leukemia, which would require quick and intensive treatment. Dr. Higgins wants to see you in the hospital this afternoon at four o’clock. He may choose to admit you and begin chemotherapy right away.” The doctor pauses. “Dr. Higgins is a first-rate oncologist.”

“Admit?” Rachel hears Tom speak through the pounding in her ears. “People don’t get admitted for chemo.”

“You’re right. Not usually. But for this one, they often do.” He’s looking at Rachel again. “It will be up to Dr. Higgins, but you may be hospitalized for several weeks.”

Rachel feels Tom’s hand tighten on her own, a single point of sensation on the numbness that has become her body.

“What does this mean, exactly?” It’s Tom’s voice again. She stares at the doctor without seeing him. He hesitates, clearly unsure whether or not to speak. When he does, Rachel senses a shift in his tone.

“This will not be an easy time for you, Rachel. Or for you, Tom. There is an excellent chance of remission in the short term, but also the likelihood of a recurrence—sometimes sooner, sometimes later. It’s a painful wait-and-see game. And I believe in being honest. The long-term recovery rate for this cancer is below fifty percent in your age group, and the progress of the disease can be rapid.” He looks squarely at Rachel again. “Dr. Higgins is the best. He’ll give it all he’s got, I promise you that.”

Back at home, Tom phones Greg and their daughter, Ellie, who lives in Vancouver. Rachel hears him from the next room, speaking in a murmur. Part of her wants to shout, “Just tell them I’m dying!” But when she opens her mouth, a choking sob emerges. With her mind focusing only on the immediate task, she packs a small bag for the hospital. At the last moment, without knowing why, she tucks her red scarf in with her bathrobe, slippers, and toothbrush.

A young nurse in navy blue pants and a yellow shirt with a teddy-bear print pulls a curtain around the hospital bed and wheels in a cart full of clear plastic vials. She inserts a needle into Rachel’s arm and extracts vial after vial of blood, which looks normal enough.

“Probably it’s all a mistake,” she says to Tom, who is in the chair beside her, doing a Sudoku on his iPad. When he looks up, she sees fear in his eyes.

Three hours later, her doctor arrives with Dr. Higgins. They pull the curtain around her and refer to the printouts in their folders. The oncologist begins to speak. Rachel feels her future slipping away from her. She is trapped in the present, in a home without windows, without gardens, without a soft place to land.

After a restless night, Rachel eases herself off the bed and onto the floor, slides her feet into her slippers, and makes her way to the bathroom. She faces herself in the mirror hanging over the stark white sink and sees a woman who bears no resemblance to the one who returned from her walk, slammed the front door behind her, and pressed “play” on the answering machine two days ago. Her unruly grey hair frames an ashen face, and dark smudges surround her frightened eyes. When she reaches into her bag, fumbling for her toothbrush, her hand pauses at its first encounter. She pulls out her long red scarf, stares at it without remembering, then wraps it around her neck. She looks into the mirror again, and this time the pale face greets her with the faintest smile, the jaunty redness of the scarf a talisman against the pale green, hospital-issue gown.

As she was warned it would, the chemotherapy leaves her sick, exhausted, hairless. She sleeps most of every day and has no interest in going home. When she does finally return home, thinner and frailer than she has ever been, with the red scarf tied over her bald head, she is thankful for the single floor house, the sunny deck—even the low-walled bathtub.

A week later she returns to the hospital lab for another round of blood work, and for the next two days she tenses every time the phone rings. When the call comes, Tom puts his arm around her and they listen together as Dr. Higgins shares the latest results: her cancer is in remission. Rachel will return for further treatments next month, this time as an outpatient.

“In the meantime, build up your strength,” the doctor says. “Eat. Rest. Laugh.”

She and Tom embrace, laugh, and do a quick dance around the kitchen table. She feels the door to the future opening a crack, a breath of air passing over her head, fluttering the tails of her red scarf.

As soon as she is strong enough, Rachel wants to visit the farm. Tom hesitates.

“You know how you feel when you’re there,” he says. “The blue toilet water,” he laughs. “The unmown lawn, the messy house.”

“No,” she says. “I need to go. The leaves will be turning now. I need to see the hill. And the river.”

And so they go. They follow the familiar route out of town—the route home—along the river where mirror images of red and gold reflect on the dark, barely moving water. The hill—their hill—stands as it always has, rising abruptly at the back of the fields. They pull into the driveway, past the old bathtub with its spent blooms dangling from withered stems. Annie comes running out to meet them.

“Grandma! Mommy made brownies,” she says. “Just for you. Because you’re sick.” Rachel takes the girl’s hand and walks with her up the brick walk and into the kitchen where Caroline is shoving dishes aside on the counter to make space for a baking pan. Greg walks across the kitchen to give her a hug. He is large and strong, and his bear hug knocks the red scarf off her head. She laughs as he lifts her off her feet. “You look better.” He rubs his hand over the downy growth on her scalp. “How’re you feeling?”

“Good. I’m fine. It’s good to be here. With you.” Here, she says, not home.

Dust covers the old cast-iron cook stove that Rachel used to polish to a shine; someone has dragged a sharp object across the maple floor, leaving a deep scratch in the surface; the autumn sun struggles to make a statement through grimy windows. Rachel notices these things, but the place smells of chocolate, and she sinks gratefully into the sofa, looking out the bay windows where she sees Annie running across the field, string in hand, a red kite bouncing on the ground behind her. Rachel gasps as the kite catches the wind and begins to soar.

“Great kite,” says Tom. “It looks homemade.”

“Yup,” says Greg. “Annie found the cloth on the field last spring. At first, we thought it was Mom’s scarf. It’s perfect kite material, so we made it together. Just look at ’er go.”

Rachel feels a chill, like a cool breeze, as she stares out the window at Annie, whose whole being tenses against the pressure of the wind and the rapidly unwinding string.

“Tom.” She is barely whispering. “Don’t let that kite get away again.”

Tom looks at her strangely. “She’s fine,” he says. “She’s really got the knack.”

“Please,” begs Rachel. “Help her.” Her breath is shallow. Greg gives his mother a worried look, and turns to Tom.

“She probably could use a hand, Dad.”

Tom shrugs and goes out the back door, calling to Annie, “Atta girl, Annie! Hang on there!”

Rachel rises from the sofa to watch as Tom places his hands over Annie’s, tightening the string, guiding the fluttering red sail. They are both laughing as they bring the kite in. Rachel braces herself, feels herself steadying, slowly descending. Landing with a jolt, she settles onto the sofa, limp and relieved.

Caroline comes into the living room with mugs of coffee and a plate of brownies. “Sweets!” she says. “Good for whatever ails you.” She looks at Rachel and smiles. “You need to put on some pounds. Have two!” Her eyes are warm, as she puts the tray down and gives her mother-in-law a hug.

She looks comfortable, thinks Rachel. Like she belongs here.

Suddenly a door to the past opens into this very room where another young mother, overwhelmed by the demands of children and a farm, sits collapsed on a worn sofa. Toys are strewn on the floor. Baskets of laundry wait to be folded. A glass of something congealed sits on the coffee table beside her. The acrid smell of wet diapers seeps into the room. The door slams shut as quickly as it opened, and Rachel takes a bite of brownie. Sweet and chocolatey and warm.

“Before we go home, I’d like to take a little walk along the river, see the colours,” says Rachel. “Winter’s coming. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” She reaches up to straighten the scarf on her head and touches bare scalp.

Annie sees her question before she can ask it: “Here it is, Grandma!” she says. “It blew off when you came in the house, but I found it for you. You should put it on. You look funny without any hair.”

Rachel ties the scarf snuggly around her head, takes Annie by the hand, and says “Come on, kiddo. Let’s check out your river before Grandpa and I go home.”

by Brent van Staalduinen

Every time I see you in the spring, your hands are dark with the expensive soil you till into those waiting flower beds. It comes in big yellow bags and never sits for long—within days the shovel and wheelbarrow are out for your annual spring performance, you the director, your husband the reluctant player. But today, it’s just you. The hem of the black dress you wore to the service is hiked up, and your knees are as muddy as your hands.

I took out the living room curtains after Cora died. We always fought about whether to keep them open or closed. I wanted to look up from my books and watch the neighbourhood move, not caring about who could see inside, but she preferred privacy. We compromised—open during the day, closed as soon as the inside lights blinked on. In truth, I didn’t get much reading done—with a book open in my lap I waited for you to come out and toil in your garden, filled then with shrubs and grasses, never flowers.

A few months after Cora’s funeral I decided to come over, but by the time I found the tulip bulbs in the basement—the ones given to me by a cousin in Utrecht—you’d gone inside. Your husband bristled at my advice, simple things to remember about timing and storage and deadheading, but he took the bulbs all the same.

I’m not sure why you’d give them to me, he said. We don’t plant flowers.

The next day, I braved another walk. You tucked some of your grey hair behind one ear and laughed away his hesitation.

I did some reading, you said. They don’t have to be much work at all.

And they’ll probably bloom every year, I said.

Just probably?

Dutch gambling.

Ha! Dutch gambling—I like that.

Your daughter Joanne comes outside. She’s changed into jeans and an old sweatshirt, creased from her suitcase. She stands with her hands on her hips as she surveys the garden, still springbare between your husband’s landscape stones. The shrubs, clipped back to the ground, haven’t sprouted yet, and you work between them with your hand trowel, digging. Joanne’s bearing is just like yours, so unlike her twin sister, who always looked as though someone was whispering at her from the ground and she was too polite not to listen. Different ways of seeing, those two. Bloom and wilt.

Joanne is holding her tongue today, I can see. Like you, she’s taking solace in rhythms, routines. Looking to the earth for the reasons a hungry stretch of highway can devour a father and a sister. Half a family. She asks you something. You sit back, shield your eyes from the sun and nod, make a motion towards the back of the house. She unhooks the garden hose from its holder and begins watering the clipped dogwood and spirea stems.

I move closer to my window. For years, this was our little game. Send your husband off to water, turn to wave at my window, flash two or three fingers. Two or three o’clock. The old bench down by Princess Point. We’ll talk about gardens we were never given space for, books we say we’ll get to but don’t, trips we would have taken, if only. But you don’t turn. You just dig.

I’m sorry about yesterday. I have a single scratch across my jaw where your fingernail caught me. I didn’t expect your anger, or the quick hand flashing up to slap me.

Pieter, go home, you hissed. And take all of that with you.

You’ve always had a temper—you’d sometimes carry down to the bench the leftover friction-heat of an argument with your husband—but it never touched me. I cooled you. Like the darkness of a root cellar, or the damp blackness of good earth, inches down.

I said, But look, I wanted to give—

No, you said. No more.

Perhaps a care-basket of jams and perennial seed packets wasn’t the best choice—I just thought that the someday you always talked about had arrived. Selfish, really. And poor timing, the day before the funeral, with Joanne freshly unpacked upstairs. Still, it was a lovely service. You didn’t see me, but it was easy to hide amongst so many friends and family and neighbours.

Joanne hasn’t moved much—she’s flooding the garden, her shoulders hunched over as the water carries the soil away. You put down your hand trowel and move next to your daughter. She lets you take the sprayer and put an arm around her. You stand together like that for a while, your trembling backs to the neighbourhood, the sun baking the neat rows of dirt-encrusted tulip bulbs laid out beside the garden.

by Susan Hroncek

They said the old woman ate children, but I never believed it.

Children disappeared; it’s just something that happened. Some wandered too close to the steel mills or the lake. Others were snatched from the park or on the way home from school. And some simply ran away. Anything to escape the taunting, the fists, the pollution that painted the sky orange and coated our world in coal-black dust.

But no cold splash of reason would make people change their minds. Take them across the sea to a new world, and they’d still clutch at the same tales, the old gods. It didn’t matter if, back in the old country, they’d never really believed. Here, thousands of miles from home, it was all they had left.

Old Mrs. Jakubek had less than most. She’d lost her children years ago to disease, starvation, or whatever else had ravaged the old country after war swept the Magyars away. Only a grandson supported her now, the infant she’d once lugged around the ship sprouted into a man who’d gone to the distant West to claim worlds of his own. Alone, she kept to her bible, her garden, her endless list of adages. Her face was a study in suffering: bones prominent beneath leathery skin, black eyes bulging from their sockets, jaw hollowed where the teeth had gone.

Surely, I told myself, someone who ate children would have more meat to them. Or at least enough teeth to chew with.

Of course, there was nothing to say she wasn’t a witch. Maybe witches here didn’t mind hobbling down to the grocer’s thrice a week. Maybe they muttered curses at speeding Studebakers and liked the taste of root beer.

Maybe they didn’t need to eat children anymore.

*****

She lived at the end of our street, overlooking the Red Hill Valley where the strawberry patches cut into the woods. Her place was an eyesore, more frayed at the edges than the other post-war homes. Plants sprouted from every square inch of her yard: every imaginable vegetable and herb, and so many poppies in late spring that her garden looked like a battlefield or a firebird’s wings.

Against the ravine, she kept a clandestine flock of chickens that scratched between the rows of onions, well out of sight. Her coop balanced precariously on knobby, thin stilts; and if you squinted the right way, it seemed to sit on chicken legs. She told me—the eldest, the responsible one—that it kept out the local fox. The younger ones preferred to think the coop would shake itself from the ground and set off on its own one day.

“Just like the witch in the stories!” Little Mirko said, bouncing from one foot to the other.

We all laughed, taking turns to peer through the blackened slats of her fence at the little chicken house. Yes, even I, who knew better. Mirko basked in the glow of his little victory.

Later, I heard his mother calling for him, her voice swallowed by the night.

The curtains of their house remained shut the following day with neither movement nor light filtering through the cracks. I passed it that evening on my way to visit Mrs. Jakubek as she read her bible, its crabbed Gothic letters blurred with use. Mama never worried how late I stayed; they were distant cousins, like everyone from the same village seemed to be. It was enough, though, for Mrs. Jakubek to insist that I call her Babička. That, and the fact she wanted to save me for her grandson, her “dear Kostêj,” who worked on a horse ranch in Alberta. She claimed that, by the time I’d be ready—“not long now, Marya”—he’d have made enough to buy a kingdom, an empire, a whole universe. And there we’d lay waste to all the armies of life and death, with nothing between us and the endless sky.

I dreamt of that kingdom as I chopped the strawberries she’d picked that day, my fingers stained red.

“You must stay away from that Ivan.” Her words shattered my fantasy. “Like all Ivans, he is trouble,” she continued, ever pleased to blame the boy next door. “Steal my chickens. Steal your heart.”

My hiccoughing fit brought her to her feet, shaking her head.

“Nie dobré. Your belly so delicate, just like a princess.”

Out came the little glasses and the famous cure-all: her own magic brew of wormwood leaves floating in an unmistakable clear liquor.

“One glass,” she said, wrinkled face crinkling in a smile. “And all will be well.”

There was never a way to refuse. And somehow, I didn’t want to. This was the way it had been, the way she’d always known. It raised the ghosts of a world that existed only in the stories—where firebirds sang and the Deathless roamed and Baba Jaga nibbled by candlelight on a child’s knucklebone.

I wanted a taste of that old world. They always spoke of it, revered it as they’d once the gold-paved streets of Canada where any man might be his own cisár. But here they trudged down the tarnished streets after full days or nights, hardly knowing the difference. And we, their new world children, suffered the insults, the mocking laughter for our funny round faces and incomprehensible last names, relics of a country we’d never see.

Trapped between fairy tale and disappointment, I knew which I’d choose.

My throat still burned as I stumbled out onto her front step, my head reeling from the bitter drink. The full moon had transformed the street into an ancient, wild landscape, deepening the shadows where monsters lurked. From the ravine rose a desperate moan—the wind through a rock crevice, a dying creature’s last breath. I turned my back on it, almost at a run.

*****

Dawn brought me to the strawberry patch, the sun’s rays just starting to warm the edge of the field. They banished the night world to the other side of the creek, where hollow trees filled with imps rattled in the breeze.

“In the half hour before others would arrive, I could take the ripest, sweetest berries for “Babička’s jam and enjoy the equally sweet silence of the city at dawn. Traffic grumbled across the bridge at Queenston Road and workers in the houses above were shuffling out their doors, but here in the valley, I could still cling to my dreams, if only a little while longer.

I squatted in the straw, bathed in the light of a red dawn like Marya Morevna among the fallen armies, until my hands found nothing beneath the itchy leaves. The end of the first row was plucked clean. I frowned at the ripped stems and red-stained straw, and struggled to my feet.

A little sob broke the birdsong, the hum of city traffic.

I started toward the valley wall, where, just beneath the edge, a shelf of rock thrust out from a blanket of last year’s leaves. Things came together, then. The night sounds, the broken stems. A hungry child’s cries in the darkness.

The changeling hunched beneath the rock, eyes wide, shoulders quaking.

“Mirko?” I knelt and reached into the shadow.

A small hand touched mine, fingernails caked with strawberry seeds. He was so pale after two nights alone, but when I pulled, he retreated further into the shadow.

“No, Marya,” he whispered. “The dragon. Hide! Before he sees!”

Heart thumping between my bones, I glanced over my shoulder.

Smoke rose in a great plume above our heads, above the whole city, it seemed. Beside it a smaller flame licked at the clear, morning sky, tasting the air for the essence of human flesh. The body was hidden behind the tops of the trees, but surely it was there—a great sarkan with scales of forged steel and teeth like iron nails to crunch on the bones of all the missing children.

The sight held me captive for an impossible moment before my foot slipped, and I saw too the rows of smokestacks, puffing soot and steam into the air.

One dream too many.

Before I could explain, Mirko pointed again, this time to the path.

“Baba Jaga!” he cried, voice crackling. “Help us!”

Mrs. Jakubek paused at the brink of the hill, black scarf tied fast beneath her chin, old black dress hanging from her bony shoulders. She peered down at us, then over at the steel mills that knew no sleep. They were this country’s own kingdom of the Deathless, where our fathers laboured in the glow of melted ore, the dragons raging within.

The explanations crumbled in my mouth. Maybe Mirko was right to be afraid.

A tuneless chant on her lips, Mrs. Jakubek set down the baskets and turned her face up to the sky. Raising her cane in one gnarled hand, she jammed into the dirt so hard that I thought the earth would shake beneath us.

At first, there was nothing. Just the birds and the rumble of cars, but the light began to soften. Soon, the blue sky was blotted out by a grey mist so thick you lost your own hands. The thick scent of old fish and sulphur filled our lungs, churning our stomachs. Mirko turned a shade paler, clutching at my arm as the smokestacks disappeared, the dragon vanquished.

We sat among the rotting leaves, unable to look away.

The old woman hobbled down the hill, muttering under her breath.

by Colleen Anderson

Jamie enters the glass-panelled Sanctuary, interspersed with shades of green; the door whisks closed behind her as she balances her matcha tea. She digs out keys for the simian rooms. Fleur watches as Jamie enters, but stays on her perch as the windows slide back. The chimp doesn’t take the offered apple.

She looks at Jamie’s face, the piercings and the tattoos. Fleur, her brown eyes precious stones amongst her glossy black fur, signs, “Liked red.”

Jamie smiles. She signs back with her free hand and speaks, mostly to keep herself company, but Fleur often understands. “You don’t like the blue hair? It’s okay. It will change.”

Leo swings from high branches with the ease of evolution to sit by Fleur on the wooden perch. It, like the trees, is manufactured, but outside the enclosure the chimps have real trees. Leo is more brown than Fleur, and his ears stick out farther. “No blue,” he signs.

They are part of the great ape family, just as humans are. Jamie brushes a hand through her hair and gives him the apple. He turns it over in his wrinkled hands, his mouth working over prominent teeth. She tosses a carrot to Fleur who deftly snatches it, then Jamie moves over to the drawer to get the lessons and tests for today. The sleek, silvery console and chairs stand out, like they don’t belong in the fabricated room. Often Jamie will take the apes outside, to the enclosed woods for their sessions. Today they will work concepts, spatial reasoning—always communication.

Jamie smiles at the apes and checks the news, tapping the screen for the next page while Fleur and Leo play with their treats before eating them. The usual politics and economics hold little interest. They’re too far removed from Jamie and the chimpanzees, and from Berek, even if the war he fights is politically based. Her heart aches knowing the bonobo apes have disappeared, hunted to extinction by the atrocities of the war where her husband is stationed. Her throat constricts. The thought of humans eating their closest genetic cousins gives Jamie the creeps. Sipping her cooling matcha, she slides into the chair to read one article. Fleur comes over, leisurely pulls herself up to the desk and sits beside Jamie, poking a finger at the keys.

“Not now, sweetie.” Jamie gently pushes her away, leaning onto one elbow. An elephant has been found in the wild, is going to be cloned. It is old. There are no more anywhere. Not Africa, not Asia—just one little Borneo pygmy elephant, a third species expert at eluding people for a very long time.

Fleur’s finger traces the image on screen. Jamie signs to her, “Forest elephant. Last one.”

Fleur lays a palm on Jamie’s shoulder. She points to the picture, her dark eyes looking intent, and signs, “No one?”

Fleur means “no one else.” Jamie shakes her head and frowns. The last elephant will be kept at the cloning facility in nearby LA, to be remade again and again. Then it will join the identical tigers, giraffes, hippopotami and other large mammals placed in zoos all over the world. Identical in every way, unable to reproduce but able to live, replicates of each species everywhere.

She looks at the chimps. Fleur and Leo are very different—individuals. Unique. And she loves them fiercely. When will their species be consumed by humanity?

But it’s too late for the bonobos, and maybe for Jamie and Berek. For them, the differences are pushing them farther apart. She’s not sure if she blames him for the extinction of the socially open chimps, or just for the failure of their all too human marriage. The war has changed him, made him unable to communicate as well as their simian cousins. Tears well up but Jamie swallows them back with a swig of tea. Fleur and Leo would notice and do nothing but pull imaginary nits from her hair all day. Concepts, reasoning—these she needs to test.

“Leo,” she calls softly.

Leo looks up from playing with the apple core, his large brown eyes inquisitive.

“Come here,” she says, giving the sign.

He shoves the core in his mouth and chewing, jumps down from the perch. He walks over in that slightly comical, rolling gait of chimps. Then he pulls himself up the chair’s arm to sit in her lap. Jamie swivels back to the monitor; Fleur watches from the desk beside the keypad. Enlarging the picture, she says again to Fleur and Leo that this is a forest elephant, the last one on Earth.

Again, it is Fleur who asks first, “Lonely?”

Jamie shrugs and runs her hand through her cropped hair. “I don’t know.” She flicks on the audio and visual to record their session for later analysis. “I think so. Would you be lonely if you were the last?”

Leo simply signs yes, but then he often gives an arbitrary yes or no to many questions.

“What does lonely mean, Leo?” Jamie signs and speaks to him.

He scratches at his head, then stares around the room, his big brown eyes more interested in the fly that buzzes about than in Jamie’s query.

Jamie asks Fleur again, “Would you be lonely?”

Fleur scratches her head and signs back, “Without Leo?”

“Yes,” Jamie says.

“Without you, or Claire, or Mike?” Fleur has symbols for the other researchers that mean “tall” and “baby face.”

Jamie pulls on the barbell piercing her eyebrow, wondering if she would be lonely without the chimps, feeling that old twinge of guilt for keeping them out of their natural habitat. “Yes. But if I was here and you were the last chimp, would you be lonely?”

“No.”

“What does lonely mean, Fleur?”

Fleur answers quickly, “Without.”

“Yeah,” Jamie says, playing with Fleur’s hand but staring at the screen. “Without.”

*****

Berek is on leave and sitting at the computer when Jamie enters the house. His long, lean back is to her, his red hair rumpled. She used to love his boyishness but now she feels the wall that has come between them. The boy is gone.

Steeling herself, she tries to sound cheery. “Hey hon, you’re back sooner than I thought. Everything okay?” She walks over and drapes her arms—tattooed in vines and flowers—over his shoulders.

He shrugs her off and doesn’t turn. It’s been five weeks. “Yeah, fine.”

“‘Yeah, fine?’” She looks down on him from the side, sees the hooded eyes. “That’s all you have to say? How about, hey babe, I’m glad to be back. Or, I missed you? Tell me what’s been happening. Let me into your world.”

“It’s . . . been . . . tough.” He glances up, no expression on his face. “I can’t give you what you need.”

Jamie throws up her hands and paces past the posters, the paintings of apes and forests. “I’m only asking for communication. Tell me what’s going on and maybe I can give you what you need.”

He stands, slowly, still in the grubby fatigues of the jungle. She’s not even sure where he’s been; all she wants is to bury herself in his arms. Being with him this way makes her lonely.

He stares at her. “Can you give me peace of mind? Can you do that?”

She grows quiet. “I don’t know. But I can give you love, if you’ll let me. If we love and share, it will help us.”

Jamie moves into his arms and for a moment he caves over her, wrapping his arms about her. They rest their heads against each other. It used to be like this, before the wars, before he thought it was the best he could do. Into his shirt, she says, “I need you,” and realizes too late her mistake.

Berek stiffens and pulls away. “I just . . . have to have space. After the jungles, the shooting, the— You’re always wanting something I can’t give.”

As he lurches to the door she realizes he’s stoned, a state that equals being back from the war; this has been his way for the last six months. And belatedly she knows she does need him, has always needed him.

Is it wrong to want warm arms around you, to wish for love? Jamie doesn’t know anymore. She is imprisoned by her need and Berek’s slow destruction. Why can’t he need her?

She chews her nail, then stops; her habits won’t help. Eventually she goes to bed, knowing that Berek is likely closing down some bar or worse, a stim joint.

It is late, three in the morning or so when she feels his cool body slide into the bed. They fuck in the darkness. It is neither the comforting sex of lovers getting reacquainted, nor an impassioned longing; it is the rutting of animals, base and meaningless, a faceless anonymity. They don’t know each other, and after Berek pulls out he turns onto his side.

Jamie reaches for him but there is no response. Like something from the wild, Berek has retreated to the jungle. Jamie floats, unanchored in the night, no sense of who she should be without Berek. She is losing him.

*****

Waves of people are leaving the cloning facility but not Jamie, and not the animals. They call it a zoo still, but its purpose has changed. Being a researcher has its privileges and she enters against the tide. She’s smoking again, knowing she shouldn’t. The chimps hate it when she does, and tell her she’s rotting. Rotting from the tar and emotions that she tries to rid herself of. She walks past the enclosure for the tiger, the muddy wallows of the hippo, and a leafy veldt for a rhino. These animals all have plenty of space but are like samples displayed for mass production, their carbon copies replicated in all the remaining zoos. Parents can bring their children and say: Look, this is what once roamed our world, before we destroyed all the trees, before we sucked away the water, before we turned these creatures into shoes and medicines and prizes. Still, we have our trophies. We can say we kept them alive.

There are no giraffes, baboons, zebras, gnus, or lions. They left for history’s long list of No More before the last ones could be cloned. As Jamie stops outside the elephant enclosure, she chain smokes her second cigarette. The elephant is diminutive, about eight feet tall, its prehensile trunk seeking amongst a tree’s leaves. The last of daylight dapples its tough gray hide. Jamie remembers seeing an elephant last when she was a child, but everything had looked larger. There have been no elephants for a couple of decades. And then this treasure, this loner, this icon that lets everyone believe they’re not all gone. One last elephant to assuage humanity’s guilt, to give a sliver of hope that wedges in Jamie’s heart.

She holds her elbow as she brings the smoke to her mouth. A tattooed sunflower clasps her bicep and wraps its leaves down to her wrist. Does the elephant know, she wonders. Does it care that it is the last and no longer free, but caged for the greedy, hungry eyes of a species who wiped out its cousins? Does it mourn the loss of all the large beasts, realizing it is the last of the land leviathans? Even the whales have disappeared. The Japanese saw to that.

Jamie drops her butt and grinds it out, then picks up the pieces and pockets them in her jeans. Horses? Cows? People? The world is diminishing as she and a few others try desperately to relate to their closest relatives, the chimpanzees.

The elephant pulls at leaves, making the branch bow and dance gracefully. It is a picture-book elephant and will be so until the end of pictures. It looks lonely though. There are no denizens to relate to anymore, not even enemies. Only one predator is left.

*****

Fleur and Leo seem listless today, lying on their backs across the branches, playing idly with a large rubber ring and a ball. Fleur drops the red ring and tilts her head to watch it roll in a diminishing circle.

Jamie thinks they feel her mood; she’s caged by a dying relationship. But she has questions to ask, if Fleur will cooperate. “Fleur?” She beckons the ape over.

Fleur stares at her for a minute until Jamie motions again. The chimp lumbers down the branch and walks over. She climbs up Jamie’s chair to sit in her lap. The wrinkled simian fingers pluck at the zipper of Jamie’s red hoodie.

She turns on the large monitor that displays the picture of the forest elephant. Pointing, she then signs, “Can you talk to elephants?”

Fleur, still cuddled in Jamie’s lap, looks at the picture, then back to Jamie. She reaches up and pulls at Jamie’s spiked hair. She dyed it back to red, not because the chimps like it but because she feels it suits her, lets her bleed a little on the outside without scaring people away.

Jamie asks again, her fingers itching for cigarettes, not signs. “Talk to elephants?”

“Yes,” Fleur answers, but Jamie knows she must delve deeper.

“Understand them? Can they talk to you?”

Fleur stares at her, lips working over her teeth. “Only you, Claire, Mike. Leo.”

Jamie sighs. It was too much to hope for, to be able to talk to another mammal besides these primates. There has only been limited success with Fleur and Leo. How much do they mimic, and how much do they truly figure out on their own? She decides to run them through some physical tests: putting together a puzzle, sequencing pictures, using keys for various locks and doors.

The day moves faster than a life, and Jamie, for a time, is lost in her love of the chimpanzees and her fascination with what they see or do. Always it is Fleur who grasps the idea while Leo is more likely to taste a key or eat a piece of a puzzle, or sit and watch the world go by.

Jamie is watching her life go by. Berek used to dote on her and she on him. “Do you love me?” she had once asked.

“More than the stars in the sky. More than the Lakers. More than red wine.” He always changed his answer, always had made her laugh, always had come into her arms.

Now her arms seem to push him away, the tattooed vines form a barrier and she can’t touch him. He has been hollowed by the war, but Jamie wonders if there was more than that. She stares out the windows into the enclosure, and decides they all need to be outside. Leading the chimps through the receding doors, Jamie knows she always needed Berek, needed his reassurances—that she was beautiful, that she was loved, that she wasn’t alone. He was her anchor but now he is dragging them both into the cold abyss.

She stops still and Leo moves past her, scaling his way up a tree. Thin green netting covers the area, letting in air and sun but keeping the apes from wandering away. Jamie clasps her arms, her head sinking to her chest. The enclosure stifles her, even if it is filled with greenery. She feels as much caught in the net as the stray, windblown leaves. Berek is her want, her need, her core, yet she is not able to move on, caged by the human feelings of belonging and reassurance.

Fleur tugs on her pant leg and Jamie gives her a carrot. The ape ambles up to a tree branch and sits eating, watching Leo first, then Jamie, then staring into the emerald canopy.

When Claire arrives, Jamie signs to the chimps and calls, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye, Leo. Bye, Fleur.”

She takes her electric car but doesn’t drive home. Instead she goes out to the coast. On the beach she watches the waves tumble in, wiping clean the sand of any imprints. Could she be like this, the past smoothed away, able to start again? She picks up a broken shell, its white edge softened by time and abrasion. Pressing the ridges into her fingers, she cannot help but feel.

A resolution, strong as the water’s force, galvanizes her to toss the shell, committing to her promise. She will change and fight to survive, make everything work.

Jamie arrives home while there is still light, even for October. She opens the door slowly, thinking, what is the best approach with Berek? Can she even talk to him?

The door thuds shut behind her, silhouetting the interior. As her eyes adjust she sees Berek moving purposefully from one room to the next, his lean frame still dressed in camo pants and an army-green wife beater. He looks good, has always looked good to her. Then it dawns on her. “Where are you going?”

He doesn’t even look at her. “Back to the lines.”

“But I thought you had two weeks’ leave.”

He stops, looks her in the eyes; and she feels as if she is the gun scope’s target. “Been called back.”

Her stomach knots. “I was coming to talk to you. I can’t do this anymore. You’re already a casualty.”

His laugh is an abrupt burst, harsh and ugly. “You’ve taken too much from me. We’ve limped along trying to make each other whole.”

She can’t help it and reaches for him, but he doesn’t move closer. “That’s not a bad thing. We could have helped each other.”

He shakes his head, his eyes red and downcast. “No we can’t.”

She swallows hard, her throat dry. “You’re right. It’s over.”

For a moment he softens. “I love you, Jamie, I do. But I can’t fix me.” Then he cracks the moment apart, spinning on his heel, going into the bedroom and coming out with two duffels.

The pain burns its way down her cheeks and she scrubs it away. She wants to reach out, beg for them to try again, but it’s no use, never was after the war.

He walks past. Her tattooed arms hang limp at her sides. At the door, Berek stops.

“You’re strong, you know.” And he is gone.

Jamie cries late into the night but now she’s done. The silence that follows is deafening, infinite, and so she turns on the computer to stream news. The voices keep her company if not the people. She lies on the bed, a cigarette in one hand, her third beer in the other. She is numb, going through the motions of sip then smoke, sip then smoke.

The night is nearly done, bringing the first shadows of day into her room. At seven she activates the phone, leaving a message at work that she is sick. Fleur and Leo will miss her but she knows they have Mike and Claire as well. She’ll make it up to them.

News wavers in and out of her attention. The riots in Belgium—there are always riots in Belgium—the latest flu fears, the price of oil. She cares little, for it is the entrapment of her soul that holds her in stasis. Could she have loved Berek more, maybe less? If he hadn’t gone to the war, would he have loved her more? Did her needs drive him away? But that’s what humans do. It is what most primates do. Love and need.

The news mentions that tomorrow the elephant will be cloned, its replicates ready for other zoos in a year. Part of a family of one. Elephants grieve too, they have families. What will this one have?

The day creeps on and Jamie paces, smoking, thinking of love and loss. Her mouth tastes acrid, poisoned. She stubs her cigarette into the ashtray on the floor. It is in this moment that Jamie decides. She can’t eat, can’t stop moving, is waiting.

Finally, dusk sets itself upon the horizon and pushes the light away. Jamie grabs a backpack and fruit, then gets into the car and drives in circles for a while, stops to buy a Coke at a drive-thru, parks and waits. She steps out of the car, watching the last pallid yellow seep from the sky. Her tattooed arms, wound with vines and flowers, seem choked but maybe it’s just the way that she holds them. The strangling was going on inside a long time ago. The breath she draws fights its way past her constricted heart.

It is time. Jamie stares up at the facility that houses the Sanctuary. No one is there at this time. Leo and Fleur sleep alone, inside. Jamie unlocks the large glass doors, her reflection staring back at her. She disables the alarm. She could find her way blind so doesn’t turn on lights, as she walks the hall to the Sanctuary.

The air is stifling but then it’s not much cooler outside. When she enters the enclosure, Leo and Fleur are asleep on a platform, cuddled into each other. It’s rare that they do this but their tangle of hairy arms is a forest of companionship. Moving quietly—they’ll wake in time—she goes over to the counter, gathers a few things, and puts them in her pack.

Leo rouses first and looks around, his big eyes mildly curious, still sleepy. He scratches his belly, yawning, running his tongue over his large teeth. Fleur sits up beside him and stares at Jamie. She signs, “Late.”

“I know,” Jamie says and signs. “Will you and Leo come with me?”

Jamie hefts the pack to her back as the chimps amble over. They follow her through the corridor and wait as she locks it behind her. Once out the front doors, she sets the alarms, then takes Leo and Fleur to the car. They climb in the back and she gives them each an apple. She tosses the pack in the front seat and gets in. Rubbing her hands over her jeans, she bites her lip.

She starts the car in motion and speeds through the quiet night. At the zoo—the cloning facility—she pulls up. “Come,” she motions to the primates. They follow her, looking around them as night presses all three close.

A place of animals is never quiet. There are small sounds, a background of rustlings, groans and grunts, of movement as the animals sleep. The nocturnal creatures are watching but their DNA is coded for stealth, and the cages hold their danger in check.

Jamie breathes in, feeling the cool air slide past the constriction. There is the faintest musk of life, and a soft blend of trees exhaling. She sees no one as she passes the large enclosures. Liberation is at hand.

They approach the elephant enclosure. There is the last of the great land mammals. The elephant is awake and rocks back and forth, its trunk raising and lowering. The gray of its body streaked, the evening’s brushstrokes upon it.

Jamie kneels beside the two chimps, and pulls off the backpack. She talks to them now, her hands too busy to sign. “Fleur, can you talk to the elephant? Can you ask if it is lonely?” As she pulls out some tools she looks at Fleur and then Leo. Do they understand?

Fleur looks to the elephant, and then back at Jamie. Jamie signs the questions again, but Fleur only signs, “No talk.”

Jamie feels as if she’s swallowed lead, something heavy, slowly poisoning her. She wishes she could vomit. From the pack she pulls more tools, slender things, delicate in the artificial light. As she hands them to Leo and Fleur, she points.

“Go. Unlock the gate.” She motions again.

Fleur walks over to the enclosure, clambering down the railing and wall, over the cement culvert to where the elephant stands. Leo follows her, their hairy shadows nearly blend into the foliage. Jamie might lose sight of them but then that’s okay. There is a gate just visible, separating the zoo enclosure from the greenbelt behind. A high fence topped with razor wire surrounds the facility.

Jamie leans over the railing, calling softly. “Open the gate, Leo.” The elephant watches, its ears flapping languorously. The grey rope of its trunk moves in slight agitation.

Fleur said they couldn’t talk to the elephant or that they can’t understand each other but there is a level where they all comprehend. Woman, chimps, and pachyderm: they live, they breathe, they cherish freedom.

Jamie talks softly to the elephant. “I don’t know if you know that you’re the last, or that you have no more friends and family. But I think you do, and for that I am sorry. I’m sorry we did this to you.”

Fleur has pulled the gate open and the elephant’s ears flare. Its trunk lifts.

“Go on,” Jamie calls as her pain trickles over her cheeks. “Be free. See the world.”

The elephant takes a step. Jamie knows they may capture it, but it deserves a shot at freedom; the greenbelt is a protected forest, and forest elephants are good at hiding amongst the trees, even if it’s not Borneo.

The elephant moves farther into the darkness, freed for now from the metal confines and a life of replication. It will have one last chance to be whole. The elephant will remain an individual a while longer. Jamie raises her hand in farewell, wishing she could have freed Berek’s heart.

Leo and Fleur have clambered back to her. They look up, handing her the tools. Once the elephant is out of sight, she puts the implements in her backpack, then squats beside the chimpanzees. Signing, she says aloud, “You go too. We have no right to keep you. Go on, be free.”

Leo scratches his head and looks from Jamie to Fleur. Fleur works her lips over her teeth as though trying to speak. She signs, “We free.”

Jamie cannot stop the purifying tears as Fleur reaches out and takes her hand, Leo her other. Together, they walk away from the zoo.

April 2016

by Brian Rowe

The little witch sucks on a lollipop, her lips and chin covered in a pumpkin shade of orange, as she peers inside the hospital room. A tall black hat covers her hair, and her brown silk dress has a large vampire cape that stretches down to her shoes. She holds a small bucket shaped like candy corn. I wave to her from the dark, gloomy corner; and she waves back. Her upbeat smile gives this room a needed ounce of cheer.

When she looks at the bed beside me, her smile fades into an appropriate witch-like grimace; and before I can say hello, the girl speeds down the fifteenth-floor hallway and disappears from sight. That’s okay—I don’t blame her. The horrors in this room outweigh anything scary she’ll witness tonight.

I finish my trigonometry homework and then start on physics, trying not to let my mom’s deep, rumbly snores distract me. I can work in the waiting room, or go home if the dank smell and flickering fluorescent lights become too much for me; but I like being near her, the sound of her breathing reassuring me she’s still alive.

When she awakens a few minutes later, I approach the side of the bed. Her face is so skeletal. Her once luminous, chubby cheeks now sunken and discoloured. She’s lost all but a few strands of her golden hair, and her eyes are squinty, as if to open them fully would require too much effort. She reaches for my arm but stops before touching it.

“Aimee?” she asks, her voice quiet, powerless.

“It’s me, Mom.” I kiss her on the forehead and grab her hand. “Can I get you anything?”

She glances around the room like she’s forgotten where she is. She moans as she starts to push herself up.

“No, no. Mom.” I bring her back down, setting her head on the pillow. “Just tell me what you need.”

“I’m thirsty,” she whispers.

“Okay, here.” I bring a cup of lukewarm water to her mouth.

She takes a few sips through a thin straw, then nods. “Thank you.” She says it so weakly, the voice of a dying ninety-year-old coming out of someone who’s not even forty.

“No problem,” I say. “Do you want something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Not even Jell-O?”

“No. Where’s Terri?”

I sit on the bed and run my fingers along her dry toothpick arms. “She’ll be here, Mom. She works until five, remember?”

“I miss her so much. She still wants to see me, right?”

“Of course she does. Terri loves you, more than . . .” I sigh. “Oh, Mom.”

She is crying, using every last ounce of her strength to move her shoulders up and down. Her lips quiver as tears spill onto her cheeks.

“I hate this,” she says. “I hate that you have to see me like this.”

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault . . .”

“This isn’t fair to you. Just let me die. I want to die.”

I don’t know what to do, so I climb into the bed, nestle my legs next to hers, and rest my chin on her forehead. I think about opening the window to let some air in, or calling the nurse to see if she can help. Instead I grab the remote control.

“Want to watch some TV?”

I don’t wait for an answer. I aim the remote towards the tiny television secured to the ceiling and press the POWER button. It takes a moment for the ancient TV to start up, but when it does, music from an obnoxious car commercial blares through the room.

“Sorry,” I say, and quickly change the channel.

I bypass five political channels, football games, the Kardashians. I’m about to give up, when I land on something special. On the screen is a man with a painted skeleton face and a black top hat. He’s clapping before a large nightclub audience as three women take the stage.

I turn to my mom, thinking she might have fallen asleep; but she’s wide awake, focused on the screen, her tears dried up. First she taps her fingers against my leg, then she sways her head back and forth to the music. When Bette Midler hits the song’s high note, my mom grins.

“I love this movie,” she whispers. “God, I forgot how much I love this movie.”

For the next ten minutes, my mom and I watch Hocus Pocus, neither of us saying a word, both of us taken with this cheesy Halloween favourite.

I first saw it at our house down in Palmdale, when my mom was eighty pounds heavier, when her face had more colour, when she was still with my dad. For a while it was an autumn tradition, popping in the scratched Hocus Pocus DVD and turning the volume on full blast. One October night we watched it three times in a row, only taking breaks for M&Ms and pumpkin milkshakes. The movie always put her in a good mood, always made her problems go away.

When the commercial break ends and Bette returns to the screen, it occurs to me this might be the last time she watches it.

“I first saw this when I was your age,” she says. “Did you know that?”

“When did it come out?”

“1993. So, yeah, I was sixteen. I thought it looked stupid, but you know how much I love Bette Midler. Did you know it came out in the summer?”

“It did?”

“Yeah, it made no sense . . . like if Christmas Vacation had come out at Easter.”

I smile, and she laughs, and then I kiss her on the cheek. I don’t want this moment to end.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, sweetheart.”

She leans her head back, ready to sleep, but then a loud knock brings her back to full consciousness.

Terri walks into the room, still dressed in her drab work clothes. After she hugs me, I move towards the wall.

“Hey, you,” Terri says to my mom. She kisses her on the cheek. “Whatcha watching?”

“Oh, just the best movie ever,” my mom says.

Terri glances at the screen for about two seconds, then sighs and taps her fingers against her hips. “The best ever? Seriously? I take it you haven’t heard of a little film called Beaches.”

“You were in your thirties when Hocus Pocus came out. I was a teenager. It made an impression on me you’ll never understand.”

“So you’re saying I’m old.”

My mom’s eyes go all wide and she says, as loud as her voice can muster, “No, I’m not! I swear I’m not!”

Resting my back against the wall, watching my mom and her longtime girlfriend lovingly bicker for minutes on end, I start to believe I’m not in a hospital room, that I’m not a witness to my favourite person withering away in front of me; instead I’m at home, before my mom suffered her stomachaches and vomiting and long nights in pain, before the cold reality of life slapped me hard across the face.

When my mom closes her eyes, Terri sits on the bed and begins to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” It doesn’t take me long to tear up, and soon I leave the room, not wanting them to see me crumble. I walk down the hallway and take a seat on the marble floor.

“What’s wrong?” a young voice says from my left. “Why are you crying?”

I force a smile. It’s the little witch from before, still licking away at her lollipop.

“It’s my mom,” I say. “She’s sick.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” I peer down the long hallway, where two nurses are standing in a doorway talking. “Where are your parents?”

A grin appears on her face, as she pulls the black hat off her head. Long blond hair falls to her waist, and with her dark-black eyeshadow and pale skin, the girl resembles Sarah Jessica Parker’s character from Hocus Pocus.

I glance inside my mom’s hospital room, at the TV screen. The movie is still on. Bette Midler is riding a broomstick and cackling into the roaring wind.

When I turn around, the girl is gone. For a moment I pretend she’s a real witch, having snapped her fingers and vanished from sight; but then I see her, racing down the hall, swinging her Halloween bucket left and right. She’s just another girl pretending.

I stand up and stretch for a minute. I don’t feel like moving. I’m scared to see my mom, and I’m terrified not to. I rest my back against the wall, as my tears start up again. I thought I could control them. I thought I could be strong.

“What’s the matter, child?” a sweet voice asks, this time from my right.

I stare at the floor through watery eyes. “My mom’s dying. She’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, nothing I can do to help her.”

“Oh, child. I’m sorry to hear about your mom, I really am,” the woman says, and then I feel a hand touch my shoulder. “Maybe I can help.”

“I’m not sure you can,” I say, turning to the woman next to me. “Oh. Whoa.”

She’s dressed as a witch—not stylish like Bette in Hocus Pocus, but still impressive—with long brown hair, a huge floppy hat, and a dress made of black-and-orange silk. I pinch myself real quick to see if I’m dreaming.

“What are you doing in a hospital?” is all I think to ask.

The lady lifts her pumpkin-shaped bucket, which is filled with mini candy bars. “My daughter and I have been going around the hospital today wishing all the patients a happy Halloween.”

The lady smiles, then waves a little girl forward, the same one from before. She yawns and takes her mother’s hand.

“Mom, can we go yet?” the girl asks. “I’m tired.”

“In a minute,” the woman says, before she grins at me. “I think we have one more stop.”

My tears have finally stopped as I guide the mother and daughter down the hallway. I feel so out of place in my bulky sweatshirt and jeans, the odd girl out. A nurse walks by and laughs, and an elderly patient asks the mother where their broomsticks are.

And then we’re in my mom’s hospital room.

Terri rises. “Aimee? Who are they?”

“How’s Mom?” I ask.

She doesn’t register my question. “Why are there witches in the hallway?”

I back away from Terri and peer over at the bed. My mom’s still breathing, still with us. “It’s Halloween,” I say. “They wanted to say hi.”

“No, not now. You should have a moment alone with your—”

“Terri, please. This will only take a minute.”

She reluctantly steps out of the way. The two witches follow me to my mom’s bed, and I drop to my knees.

“Mom?” The stench of vomit invades my nostrils, but I ignore it. “Mom, it’s me. There are some people here who want to meet you.”

She slowly opens her eyes. “Aimee?”

I rest my hand on hers. “It’s me. How are you?”

“Aimee . . . I’m scared . . .”

“I know you’re scared. I am, too.” I point to the woman behind me. “Look who’s here.”

I stand up and move next to Terri, as the two witches kneel beside my mom. The girl holds one of my mom’s hands, and the mother brings her palm to my mom’s cheeks. And that’s when I see it, so clearly in my mind: a small, orange light emanating from their fingertips, the mother chanting, the daughter joining in, the room starting to shake, my mom convulsing at the hands of great power. I can see every light in the room exploding, Terri and I ducking to the ground, not removing our hands from our faces until the emergency light turns on. I’d watch my mom sitting upright, her breathing heavier, her eyes opening wide, the first words out of her mouth filling me with a happiness I never thought I could feel again: “Can we go home now?”

This incredible movie plays out in my mind, as the mother and daughter both wish my mom a happy Halloween and then quickly exit the room, not forgetting to leave a few candy bars on the nightstand. My mom waves to the witches, and blows a kiss to me and Terri, before she closes her eyes and falls asleep.

I stay in the room as long as I can, waiting for my mom to wake up. I flip through the channels. Hocus Pocus is still on. Bette is turning into stone now, and the corny music is swelling. Terri holds my hand hard enough to break me.

The end credits roll. I’m still waiting.

by Jason S. Ridler

Dave,

I’m dispensing with formalities because it is my last day. Please, read all of what’s below. Some of it is old hat. But the truth is in the details. I want you to know the truth. To help stem the tide of what you unleashed. I’m reminded of my grandfather’s favourite saying, said every morning before he hunted for Soviet incursions with the Rangers, instant coffee in hand, not a wisp of steam. “Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow wood. Only today the fire shines brightly.” I think he’d have approved of my decision.

This is my final report on the Army of You.

You hadn’t yet been dragged from Winnipeg when I found the first strand. In September, Iqaluit Airport contacted RCMP HQ about disturbing notes in the men’s and women’s bathrooms. There’d been a suicide there the past week, one of a rash so bad it even made the country remember our territory existed. Given the suicide, the security at the airport wasn’t sure if it was vandalism or something more menacing. So I trailed out to the sick yellow eyesore of the tundra, an airport the colour of fresh piss in powder snow.

It was the same note in both rooms. Same old font. Same paper. No fingerprints. I’ve included the text below. The original is still in the evidence locker.

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR YOU

You’re powerless. Paralyzed in word and deed. And the loop in your head informs you with relentless persistence that it will not, cannot, get better. It sings the voice of the oppressor, the pretty face in the spotlight that smiles your damnation.

And it’s right.

Because it led you here, to this time, this moment, this place.

To us.

The lost find themselves. So please know, that as of right now you are not alone. Ever.

And you have a choice to make. Either one is right. We will respect both. But know that the choice is there.

In your bag or pocket is a one-way-ticket of pills, razors, or perhaps a single bullet from a gun too easily found. That is choice A.

In your hand is this note. And on it these words. Choice Y. Together they form a message. It is simply this:

Every hero has an origin story.

Including you.

I know, you’re not a hero.

Not yet.

But you can be.

You can have your own origin story.

In myths and comic books, fate chooses heroes. Spider bites and gamma rays, dead parents, and orphans.

In real life, fate rolls a die. Box cars? Good genes. Rich parents. Milk and honey. Snake eyes? Abuse, poverty, starvation and other bastard ponies of the apocalypse.

You? You’re snake eyes.

But you should know that snake eyes shine.

Because snakes don’t play by the rules.

And it’s time to rig the game. Box cars. Box cars from here to infinity.

You roll them by fighting.

You roll them by living.

You roll them by not letting them win. Not without a hellish showdown where their victory will be meaningless compared to the glory of your defeat.

And know you’re not alone.

Do not let fate write your origin story.

Be bulletproof.

And when you must face the unfaceable, when you fight the insurmountable, and when the final confrontation emerges and the supreme effort is spent, you will have left your mark.

And all the tools you need are with you.

Crush those pills into powder.

Sharpen those razors so fine that you can cut someone without feeling a thing.

Save that bullet for the one who made you buy it.

You are not fate’s whipping child.

You are not alone.

You are multitudes.

We are the Army of You.

Next day, the body of Roc Legasse was found frozen to death—just outside  the security camera range of the main office at Chidliak mine, in his Chevy cabin—blue as the sky. Bastard had domestic violence charges going back a decade. I’d been called out once or twice to back up the locals. But his wife, Donnie Okalak, never pressed for legal action. They have a daughter, Terra. A dancer. She’s part of the Artcirq Circus. Joined the day he died. When I talked to her, she had frostbite on her nose. But so did I. And her father was a career drunk, so there was no serious investigation.

I didn’t even think of the Army of You until later, when I was finishing paperwork at the office later that month, when Hughes and Wright were laughing as they headed home.

“ . . . more like the loser patrol.”

“Better name, anyway.”

“What is?” I asked. Then they told me. Another note. The same type. Found at Co-Up Gas Bar on Federal Street. Left on the floor of the bathroom. A known place to huff and shoot. There’d been an OD there a while back. Inuit girl named Nessa Suqi. Eighteen. Went to Inuksuk High. Big girl, close to three hundred pounds. Swallowed enough valium to choke a moose. Hughes and Wright called her Moby Chick.

The Gas Bar was on the way home.

They’d installed a blacklight last year after the last Inuit kid slammed gas into his veins and died on the toilet. I found graffiti. Fresh. Cartoons of Suqi and her husky, Sharkie, high above the dull Sharpie dicks, tits, and bad jokes. It was signed “Army of You.”

I asked the clerk, Old Hanson, if he’d seen anyone.

“Some Eskimo in a hoodie, but that’s what they do. Ask for the key and make a goddamn mess of everything. And yes, I said Eskimo, and you can write me up if you want. I’m a quarter-fucking-Eskimo, and we’ve been here a lot longer than you. And I’d never wear that uniform, you Mountie shit.”

Hanson couldn’t identify him. Just that it was a him. A hoodie-him-Eskimo.

That’s when it got serious. That’s when we took down Charlie Ila.

Charlie was a huffer. Inuit. Flunked out. Vandalism and graffiti. When we’d investigated Suqi’s death, his name came up as a friend. Funny thing, investigating suicides: the dead have more friends than the living. Same with Suqi. Lots of tears from lots of girls, and a few boys. But Charlie said nothing. No tears.

Then “shots fired” at Inuksuk High.

Now it mattered.

Gas station suicides don’t get CTV and Lisa LaFlamme talking. Gunfire at a school? Almost as captivating as American Idol. So you were flown in from Winnipeg and the word Task Force was bandied about. The boss said I was to be your right hand as we organized your “assault on Inuksuk.” Charlie was in the girls’ bathroom, the janitor had said. He had a gun. Two shots had been fired. You wanted to go in hard, and almost had a stroke when I handed you my piece. I didn’t want a fire, or ash. If I failed, we could tear gas the school and make it uninhabitable for a year. I saw you calculate the values in your eyes. Deny an Inuit officer a chance to make peace? Didn’t smell good. And that was enough.

I told Charlie who I was, that I was coming in, that I wanted to talk to him. Nothing. I pressed in the first door, let it close behind me. Told Charlie I was going to open the inner door. Nothing.

The fluorescent lights turned the scene into a macabre still life of slaughter. Two girls, dead and bleeding bright, chest wounds so huge, on the floor, slumped and twisted. Charlie had a torn and stained Oilers shirt that had been a hand-me-down for at least two generations. He had his pistol down. He wouldn’t speak, but his free hand pointed at the bathroom wall.

Black marker over fresh paint. A picture. Of Nessa Suqi, bloated, breaking out of her coffin. R.I.P. FAT FUCK was written in the bubbly scrawl girls use for class notes.

The two girls at Charlie’s feet? Tamar Rich and Dana Opik. They’d cried the most when we had talked about Suqi. Her good friends. One of them held a Sharpie. Charlie gripped the pistol by the barrel and handed it to me.

“We rolled boxcars for Nessa,” he said, as I relieved him.

“Who’s we?” I asked, half-terrified that someone might have hidden in the stalls.

Charlie smiled. Hasn’t said a word since. Just draws on walls, toilet paper, and anything else he gets his hand on. Beautiful stuff. Mostly cartoons about a bear and penguin.

You were interested, Dave. Remember? When the cameras rolled. And the pretty blonde reporter from Montreal with the heart-shaped ass under her parka arrived underdressed for our territory, smiled with glossy lips, and asked you dumb questions? If they’d sent a fat guy, I suspect you wouldn’t have mentioned the bit of strange I’d mentioned in confidence. About the Army of You.

I hope she sucked your balls dry, Dave.

Because here we are. Websites. Copy cats. From Toronto to Tanzania. T-shirts. YouTube vids from bored teenagers across the world. A phenomenon beyond Baffin Island. So the media got the hell out of Dodge. Left Nunavut behind as the funerals grew in our territory. And the truth gets blurred into the other violence of the world. And we’re forgotten. Yesterday’s ashes. No fire burns for them to see. Just some dead-hoodie-Eskimo.

They ignore us again. But I see it.

The suicide rate remained 71/100K into October.

But the victims are older. Moms. Dads. Elders.

No more kids.

No one under thirty. Maybe a handful of teens.

If you were just looking at the suicides, you’d say things had remained the same.

But I know different.

Last Thursday, I was visiting a friend, Marissa, in Apex. She works at Nanook with the elementary kids. Not everyone in Apex likes us. Old hates going back a long time. To see an Inuit in the uniform is a big betrayal, just like Old Hanson said. I’ve lived with that burden for a long time. Part of the job.

Halloween was around the corner, so I went with bags of popcorn and candy that always smell like I’m about to go into a movie. We never had it any other time. The school was filled with ghosts, vampires, axe murderers and laughter. So much laughter. So much joy. Marissa introduced me, and I did the Halloween safety speech that guys like Hughes and Wright won’t touch. They’d rather be at the gym, or the range, or fucking other men’s wives. But I liked the kids. And they seemed to like me as I told them about the buddy system, wearing reflective arm bands, avoiding fruit and veg and anything not from a store. And while looking at that room of giggling monsters, I caught a chill.

They laughed at everything.

Every safety tip.

Every joke.

Everything.

And then Marissa saw them passing something amongst themselves, from goblin to witch to ghost. She remained stock still, calm and cold, then gave it to me.

“Nick? Where did you get this note?” she asked.

A kid dressed like Spider-Man shrugged his shoulders. “Bathroom.”

The note was of the same paper. Same font.

THIS IS A MESSAGE FOR YOU

I ran, note crushed in my hand, crashed through the double doors, and saw a dark shape crawl through the blinding-white open-window high up the wall. I pulled myself through, shoving myself out. A figure ran south, hard, onto the rough rock of the bay. They were as fast as fire on dry kindling. We ran like hell, straight for the littoral.

“Stop!” I cried, and only when the water lapped their Converse at the edge of the water did they turn. A person in a hoodie. I couldn’t see their face.

“They’re just kids!” I said. “Don’t do this to them!”

The hooded figure’s breath was streaming out of its dark maw. “Read it.” The voice was muffled. Masked. They took more steps into the water. “Read it.”

“Stop!”

“Read it!” The school bell shattered our dialogue, and the figure plunged into the dark water. I shoved the note in my jacket pocket, tore off the jacket, and dove in.

Nothing.

Shaking, drying off at the school, I opened the crumpled note from my pocket.

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR YOU

Today is one of change. You wear a costume to feel strong, to be brave, to be more than you are.

Tomorrow, wear that costume on the inside. Be the monster you want to be. And beware those who wear costumes on the outside. Uniforms that tell you what to do. Because those aren’t real heroes. Do not trust them. Trust the monster you were born to be. Let your monster be your guide. When the world scares you, scare it back. When the world hurts you, hurt it back. When it tries to kill you, kill it back.

It’s hard to be a monster.

You feel all alone.

But remember, we are all monsters on the inside. All the lost souls, we sing with one voice.

We are a chorus.

We are monstrous.

We are the Army of You.

All I found was a hoodie.

There was an eerie calm last night. No more Halloween violence. No vandalism. But it’s All Saints’ Day I’m worried about.

So I put in my papers. I’m tired of chasing ghosts. Getting there just in time for a funeral, or the media’s cold glare before it vanishes. Marissa told me they need a new P.E. teacher at Inuksuk. Last one had tried to drink bleach.

I hope I can make a difference. Without a uniform. Because it’s the only true way to stop the Army of You, Dave. Make it unnecessary. That’s what I’ve learned. Prevention, because once the rot starts there is no cure. For me, or you.

August 2016

by Frederick Senese

In that country, they don’t bury the dead. They pile the bodies on a criss-cross platform of logs and sticks out in the forest, so the flies can eat. The life drips off the bones until what remains is pure, pristine, perfect. Bleached ribcages scoured by the wind, seashell skulls washed by the rain.

Every seven years the People wrap the bones in fresh linen and parade them through the village. In this way the dead can watch the ongoing trials of the living from afar, and know the comfort and consolation of distance.

In the beginning, I shared that perspective.

I lived with the People of the Thorns. They carried iron blades shaped like leaves. Their malarial yellow eyes glowed in the darkness of their huts. At first I thought it was me that they watched, but it was my shoes. My shirt, my pants, the notebooks and pens I carried.

When I said salama, hello, one response was “Don’t speak. You don’t belong here.”

When I left my flip-flops outside my hut to dry, they were stolen.

When I bought a toothbrush for that girl with the mouthful of rotting crockery, she sold it.

I was alone until the Highland People extended their patrols to my new village. They were as dark and deadly as the Kalashnikovs strapped across their backs. I’d find them hammering down Three-Horses at the Chez Merde. Iron grenades dangled from their belts: I let them win at Fanorona. But I played the game. I moved the pieces. They accepted me.

They taught me Gash. I learned that kibo means belly, so a kibokibo is a joke. Velona is to live, to be alive. Mamy fo velona (sweet heart living) means to be centred only on one’s self; to care only for one’s own life. Ahy means me. It also means mine. As a verb, it means to be a cause for worry.

I met a holy man who wore a baseball cap and Soviet-era khakis. His magic was not about healing or love, but about tromba, spirit possession. Tromba is a gift, he said, not a curse. It’s a call by the ancestors to do what’s right. But sometimes it goes wrong.

The village church sometimes performed exorcisms for bad tromba, but it was mainly a place for singing. Every Sunday morning they chanted heaven down to earth. Heaven isn’t far from that country.

Neither is hell. One morning I woke in a cold sweat that blossomed into a hot fever by nightfall. I couldn’t move. I cried for help. The holy man came and forced bitter tea down my throat, and I vomited until I couldn’t think anymore. Tsara, he said. Good.

When the rainy season came, blue mold bloomed on my leather boots. The road to the capital washed out and the food trucks stopped coming. The last loaf of fresh-baked bread I bought was the best I ever had. But there were eyes and hands all around me. I couldn’t refuse them.

I was hungry, for the first time in my life.

There was only tea. I learned to turn my cup upside down when the tea was gone, then right side up again. My future was there in the Rorschach grains. A butterfly for passion. A moon for tromba. A comet for bad luck.

All of that came true.

One day I saw an axe: hardships that end. A mushroom: a sudden departure. A kite: a long journey.

I was going home. Back to mamy fo velona.

Two years after I came, I left that country with no bags to check. I gave away everything I had. And everything I wished I had.

It wasn’t enough.

September 2016

by Mary J. Breen

I can’t imagine how people can go on television and tell their stories to the whole blessed world. Like on Oprah, although she does seem like a nice person.

Today I watched a show called Abusive Husbands in the Military and The Wives Who Love Them. Couldn’t have been hard to find a couple of those. When it ended, I did something I should have done long ago: I took down the photo of Richard and me on our wedding day, and stuffed it into the piano bench under the Sears catalogue.

*****

We did look rather grand, him in his Navy whites and me in my white satin. Barbara borrowed that dress for a high school play, and I told her not to bring it back, to just give it to the Drama Club. Truth is I wanted it gone before she might think of wearing it for her own wedding. As it turned out, she didn’t want a real wedding dress anyway. She made a kind of caftan from a pink Indian bedspread. I thought Richard was going to faint when he saw it. And Jonathan, her husband—that is, her ex-husband—was in sandals, and a gold brocade jacket, and baggy white slacks no better than pajamas. He looked like that Indian politician I used to see on the newsreel at the movies after the War.

Richard and I had a proper wedding, for what it was worth. Nothing but the best. Daddy was a great friend of the Bishop, so of course it had to be the Basilica for his little girl. All those extra blessings certainly didn’t do us much good. Then off to the Château for champagne and chicken à la king for over a hundred and fifty people. Must have cost Daddy a pretty penny.

 “The charming young bride, given in marriage by her father, wore a full-length gown of satin and French lace designed by Yves de Montréal. Her fingertip veil fell from a pearl tiara, and she carried a bouquet of white and peach roses. For her going-away outfit . . .”

Why on earth would I still remember that write-up? Maybe because it was page one of my Fairy Tale Gone Wrong.

*****

After the reception, the happy couple raced out through the confetti storm and jumped into Richard’s friend’s car which we’d borrowed for the week. He got into the driver’s seat, waving at everyone—Lord of All He Surveyed—but as soon as he got us around the corner, he pulled over and made me drive. It turned out his license had been suspended, but he didn’t want anyone to know. And so I drove, obedient from the start.

We reached the resort in Gatineau in time for drinks before dinner. We had wine with our meal, and Richard had a few more drinks on the deck as we watched the sun set over the lake. When we got back to our room, he told me to “get ready.” I had no idea what that meant, so I went into the bathroom to get undressed. I was probably in there for ten minutes, as I couldn’t manage to get into my nightgown. I’d had it made from the same pattern as my wedding dress, so it too had a million buttons down the front—impossible-to-undo buttons. Finally I got enough of them open to pull it over my head. When I checked the mirror to see if I looked okay, I saw that my whole chest was covered in coloured confetti. I went out to show Richard how funny it looked, but before I could, he’d grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved himself against me, tearing at my nightgown so the buttons popped off and flew about the room. I managed to push him away, but then he hit me with the back of his hand so that I fell sideways, knocking over the bedside table and his drink. I remember the smell of the Scotch as it dripped on my head. That’s not all he did.

Bruises came up on the side of my face and all down my arm. At least they were fading by the time we got home. I told my parents I’d fallen in the tub, and my mother made a point of saying she believed me. Daddy didn’t say a word.

No one makes TV shows called Men Who Drink and Beat Their Wives. That’s not news.

I never told anyone about Richard. I didn’t dare tell my parents, and my only brother was living out in Calgary then; he’d have said either I shouldn’t have married Richard, or I should leave him. No grey areas for him. No one ever mentioned his drinking to me. Of course the kids know their father drank too much, but now that he’s dead, they seem to be making him into a Latter-day Saint. Good old Dad. So much fun!

As the years went by, the kids arrived, and I just tried to carry on looking after them, keeping them safe. Then in 1969, I think it was, I was at my doctor’s for a checkup. I was sitting there in one of those ridiculous gowns that barely cover a person, so my doctor couldn’t help but notice the bruises on my neck and legs. I told him I’d fallen. Tripped on the stairs. He looked at me so long and hard that tears came to my eyes.

“Make him happy, Mrs. Whalen,” he said, patting my leg. “Make him happy, and you’ll make yourself happy.” He said he had just what I needed.

So it began, my life with Valium. It did make me less nervous, less edgy. I still knew that I should be on alert, but I’d lost the ability to plan ahead. It was as if I’d forgotten how to worry. As time went on, I forgot other things: appointments, where my keys were, even how to make anything but the simplest dinners. I’d become an idiot, and being an idiot, I didn’t understand that I’d become an idiot because of the pills. Richard seemed to be forever angry; every second sentence began with “For Christ’s sake, Vivian!” And when he’d start hitting me, I couldn’t muster the will or the strength or the focus to fight back.

I continued to take Valium until our last kids, the twins, were about to leave for university. Richard decided we should take them on one last camping trip, and in the packing process, I forgot my pills. I forgot my pills precisely because I was taking those pills. After three or four days without them, I realized I’d managed to make us a whole dinner over the campfire, and I hadn’t messed it up or forgotten anything. At the same time as my head started to clear, I also began to feel very strange, as if I’d become two people: the one cooking our breakfast and the one watching someone who looked just like me cooking our breakfast. I suffered terrible headaches, especially in the bright sunlight, so on our last night, Richard told me to rest in the tent while he took the girls for hamburgers and a movie, impressing on them how well he was treating me in my distress. When they came back, they told me the plot of the movie, and I remember being astounded that I could actually follow what they were saying.

I never took another pill. This made me much smarter again, but of course this had its dark side too. As the feeling of bungling along under water receded, I became more aware of the danger I was in, and my natural impulse to fight back returned. This enraged Richard. He kept saying, “I thought you’d learned your lesson.”

*****

I don’t know what I’ll tell Barbara when she notices the empty spot on the wall where our picture was. She goes on about the subjugation of women, but she won’t like finding out she has a mother who couldn’t stand up for herself. She doesn’t understand what it was like then, that if I had left their father I would have had no money whatsoever, and then Richard would have gotten custody because of my “inability to provide.” And he’d have kept them from me; that I know.

I’m never going to tell the kids this next part. They know their father drank, but they don’t know they had an unfit mother too. I’ll never tell them that many a time when I didn’t know how I was going to face another day—and another night—I used to pray that Richard would hurt one of them—just a tiny hurt they wouldn’t remember, but big enough to leave a mark that would give me grounds to take them and leave. People wouldn’t point a finger if the children were the ones in danger. It was the only escape I could think of. So you see why I can’t tell them that. I don’t want them to know they have a wicked mother, ready to sacrifice her children for a ticket out.

October 2016

Lisa Morriss-Andrews studied theatre arts, chemistry, French and Russian, and obtained her MAC in Research. Then she abandoned academics to write full-time. In 2006 she attended the Banff Mountain Writing Program (Banff Centre), and, in 2011, the Summer Literary Seminars: Vilnius, Lithuania. She has won local writing awards, an international online award and a number of scholarships over the years. Her work has appeared in the Louisiana Review, Phati’tude and online in the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s exhibition: Telling Stories, Secret Lives. All of her unpublished novel manuscripts have placed in the semi-finals/finals of the Faulkner-Wisdom creative writing competitions.

by Lisa Morriss-Andrews

Mother calls out for my oldest sister, Miranda. Her voice bleats into the sterile silence like a lost child, startled from a nightmare. Death is a nightmare . . . for my mother. An extraordinary and unexpected event. “How terrible . . . how could this possibly happen!” she would exclaim, each time someone strayed from the fold of the living.

The living are in the fold outside of the hospital’s ICU right now. As they go about their day-to-day business, most are completely unaware of the catastrophes, preoccupying those of us currently inside.Thick white drapes block the fold from seeing and also the summer sun from cheering on the dying. I wave my hand gently across my mother’s face, but her open eyes remain fixed on the ceiling.

*****

“Mommy, it’s me, Ginger. I love you.”

I stroke her hand to warm her translucent skin. It is chilling rapidly and looks pearlescent against her purple varicose veins. She hated her veins. I told her that she had hands of Creole marble. She loved Creole food, and she loved marble. Although, when it came to sculpting, only rose alabaster would do.

“Miranda,” she croaks again, “my princess.”

This time, her voice is barely audible, yet everyone present looks up and takes note of what she has said. Mother is oblivious to all of us. Her eyes look stagnant. Her faint breath rasps with irregularities. Mine catches with surprise.

The nurse’s hand touches my shoulder. “It won’t be long now,” she says.

My hands clutch the sodden tissues, tear-soaked and wadded with hours of grief.

“But my sister Miranda hasn’t come yet,” I say. “She begged us to buy her a ticket. She hasn’t seen Mother in years.”

Absently, I drop some wet tissues on the floor. The nurse instantly spots the offending litter and scoops it into a closed wastebasket. Embarrassed, I pretend not to notice. Everything here is so spotless and orderly, except death. Or maybe death is too, and I just don’t understand the cues.

“And your other siblings?” the nurse asks.

“They will come for the funeral,” I say.

She raises her eyebrows, but spares me further questions.

I do not tell her that they are afraid of death, repulsed by the sight of it. For them, death is also a catastrophe—an unexpected and extraordinary event. I was the only one who wanted to come. Until Miranda changed her mind.

“Miranda’s flight was due in last night,” I say. “I’ve left so many messages on Mother’s answering machine.” Then I have to bite my cheek to hold back another flood of tears.

“Can you pick her up? Your sister, can you get back here within the hour?” the nurse says.

I look away. “But I can’t leave my mother. Not now.”

The protocols of dying are much too efficient and streamlined for me. I want to sabotage them all. Doesn’t the nurse realize that this is my reward—for being the one who came, the one who arrived in time to help. The one who looked out for everything. Still, I know she heard—the nurse, that is. I know she heard Mother ask only for Miranda. Not for me, Ginger. Not for Rosa, Tanya or Eli—my other siblings. Not even for Jessie, the cat. Just for Miranda. I try to console myself that it is only unfinished business with Miranda.

“If you hurry, you can make it back in time,” the nurse says.

“But—” I stop myself.

What is the point of explaining? This woman spends her days watching and recording the minutiae of dying, the transparency of human life. Throughout each patient’s journey, she negotiates the practical needs of family and friends, as well as the volcanic eruptions, spewing and threatening to derail the main event—her patient’s death.

She must know a lot about life and people . . . I’ll give her that. But she doesn’t know my sister. Miranda flummoxes everyone.

“You should go quickly,” the nurse reminds me gently. Then she resumes scribbling on her chart.

I grab my backpack and run through the maze of sterile, fluorescent-lit hallways. All the way to the parking lot, my anger at Miranda reverberates off the sparkling, yellow tilework. I hurry to the safety of my car. There, inside, I can cry to my heart’s content.

Driving along beside Lake Ontario is cathartic. Watery images swim against the glittering azure water. Sunlight bursts on the rhythmically cresting waves. Mother loved the lake. She loved Southern Ontario in the summer. How can she possibly die on a day like today?

At home I unlock the door to Mother’s house, expecting Miranda to be waiting in the entry. But only absence is there to greet me. Absence and the sound of the kitchen clock ticking relentlessly into the void.

“Miranda?” I call out.

There is no reply. The silence is bleak. I step into the long hall, which connects to every room.

“Jessie? Jessie? Here, kitty kitty!”

Even Jessie fails to appear.

Then I spot Miranda through the door into the kitchen. She is staring out the window over the sink, either completely unaware of or ignoring my presence. I drop my backpack on the floor. Miranda still doesn’t move. I watch her bite into a clove of raw garlic. Its pungent odour permeates the stench of her stale cigarettes. Mother never allowed smoking inside her house. Now, here is Mother’s princess, a crown of smoke encircling her head. I cough to get her attention. Miranda finally turns towards me, takes a long drag and blows fresh smoke in the direction of my face. Her hand clutches a saucer, heaped with crushed cigarette butts. The dirty pile obscures the pattern on the plate.

“Miranda,” I say softly, trying not to startle her. “It’s me, Ginger.”

Miranda doesn’t speak. She chews garlic in between cigarette puffs.

“I can’t believe that it’s been fifteen years—fifteen years since we last saw each other,” I say.

Miranda doesn’t move.

She probably has cataracts now that obscure her vision. I decide to hug her, timing my approach between rounds of lengthy puffs. As I reach out and squeeze her rigid, boney frame to my ample girth, I spot a half-empty mickey of vodka, standing in the sink. I pull away and open the kitchen window.

“Don’t! It’s freezing in here,” she says.

“Yes, but it’s nice and warm outside. We’ll let the sunshine in,” I offer cheerily.

Miranda casts her faded grey eyes towards me. I shiver. “I’ll get you a fleece.”

“No! Fleece is toxic. It off-gasses,” she says in a raspy voice, eerily reminiscent of Mother’s.

The saucer shifts slightly in her hand. That’s when I spot a small patch of the blue-and-white geometric pattern, peeking through the mess. Immediately I recognize Mother’s favourite Blue Willow china. Shit, Miranda, couldn’t you have used an old jar lid for an ashtray?

“So when did you get in?” I ask as neutrally as possible. “I’ve been phoning all night.”

Miranda stares at me blankly.

“Miranda, Mother is dying,” I remind her. “I’m sorry to rush you, but we really do have to hurry now.”

Miranda’s eyes fill with tears. She says nothing. Standing there so frail and pathetic, she is at once Ophelia, dredged up from the depths of Lake Ontario. Again, the saucer shifts into view. I glare at it without making any attempt to disguise my annoyance. Garlic skins lie pearlescent in the grey ash.

“Didn’t you find any cereal to eat for breakfast?” I ask. Again I struggle for neutrality in my voice.

Miranda turns, wild-eyed, and blurts out, “I can’t believe you let Mother eat that genetically modified crap. No wonder she’s dying.” Then she whirls back around to face the window. “I threw it out this morning, with the coffee.”

“So what’s wrong with her coffee?” I ask.

“You don’t know?” Miranda snaps, swinging back around. She gapes at me with astonishment.

I would like to challenge her selective logic. But Miranda is ardently religious about her causes. She leaps in whole-heartedly, while I wallow in a chasm of disbelief.

Miranda reaches for a coffee cup on the table and hands it to me. “Fair trade. I brought it from home.”

“Thanks,” I say, taking the coffee and sitting down at the kitchen table. After a few more minutes of prickly silence, I speak. “I’m glad you made yourself at home, Miranda. Didn’t you get my messages?”

A cigarette flicks between Miranda’s lips. She is puffing freehand, while she husks another clove of garlic.

“Miranda?” I say again.

“I just got up. Yesterday was exhausting . . . traveling here.”

“I know, Miranda. I’m sorry. But we really do need to go to the hospital—right now. Mother is dying.”

Miranda’s face disappears momentarily into a veil of grey haze and then re-emerges. Her mouth is shrivelled like an apple doll and her dry, frizzy hair flares out around her sallow face. I can’t believe this is the same sister I knew. The sister whose thick blonde braids in childhood swung heavily against her cherry cheeks and brightly coloured blouses. Once the picture of health, she stands here now, stooped and wan in a threadbare nightgown. And somehow I am to believe this woman is still my sister.

“Mother,” Miranda says, biting into the next clove of garlic and waving her hands like a fairy godmother, “used to serve such elegant teas. Always setting the table with beautiful crisp white linens, silver demitasse spoons, and her lovely Blue Willow china . . .”

The clock’s tick is hammering now. But Miranda rambles on, detailing the particulars of her life—before I was born. She is twenty-plus years my senior—another generation. She was born during WWII. I should listen to her. I might actually learn things . . . about our mother and father, our family—about another era.

“. . . on my own special tea set.”

“Which tea set?” I say, jolted from my brooding.

“Snow White,” she says, flicking ash onto the floor.

I jump up, trying not to scream at her. “We all had the Snow White tea set, Miranda. Look, it’s time to go—now.”

“No, Snow White was mine,” she says. “You had your own tea set.”

Miranda’s eyes grow to saucer-size. They burn with an emotional fire that lights up her whole face. In this moment, she is more alive than I have seen her in years. It’s almost worth the tea set! She does not take her eyes from me. I look at the clock. My sister is sixty years old. She is clinging to childhood memories as if her life depends on them.

“And the Christmas ornaments,” she blurts out.

I look at her stupefied. I feel like I’m in an Ionesco play, trying to make sense of this stranger, my sister. Why is she clutching these inanimate possessions, while Mother is dying?

“Miranda, what are you talking about? Mother’s things belong to all of us. After she dies. But right now she—”

Miranda cuts me off. Her voice is close to raging. “I was the only one born when Mother bought those ornaments.”

I scour my brain for a comeback, anything to derail her from this tirade. “Surely you don’t want to keep those old things—they’re coated with mercury.”

“Well, I’m not going to suck on them,” she says indignantly, and then smiles.

I stand there for several seconds, speechless, staring at the gaps in her teeth. Fallen soldiers—victims of neglect and decay. Mother would be so shocked. We all grew up brushing our teeth to the buzz of an egg timer—five times a day. Miranda was Mother’s star performer.

She notices me staring. Stubbing out her cigarette, she plunges two fingers inside her cheeks to pull her mouth wide like a clown. “Look Ma—no teeth! Ha, those bastard dentists. Nobody’s filling my head with amalgam now. Must think I don’t have any brains.” She smirks as she reaches for another cigarette.

I try a new tactic. “Miranda, don’t you want to tell Mother goodbye?” At this point, I’m actually pleading with her.

“Mother was such a party girl,” Miranda says, puffing and sitting down again. Shrugging her shoulders provocatively, she crosses her legs and winks. “Well, what were girls supposed to do during the War—sit home and cry? Everyone was involved in the War effort . . . .”

Who is this woman? I long to believe that we are unrelated.

“I moved my things from Mother into my room.”

“Miranda,” I snap, “we’ll deal with Mother’s stuff later. Those things belong to all of us—all five of us. Now, for God’s sake.”

Miranda flies up from her chair, knocking the Blue Willow saucer to the floor. It smashes, scattering butts and releasing a flurry of ash onto the white linoleum. “None of you were even born then. Those things mean nothing to you.” She grabs a bottle of bleach from under the sink and sloshes it, undiluted, onto the floor. I watch as bleach seeps into the ash, creating a turbid slurry. The smell is noxious. I retreat outside to the back patio.

“Fifteen minutes—then I’m going back to the hospital,” I yell to Miranda through the screen.

The rigid stalks of Mother’s Birds of Paradise shoot towards the sky, where their bright orange and blue flower petals perch in the afternoon sun. I sit down on the steps beside them to drink Miranda’s offering of fair-trade coffee, now already cold. A cloud creeps over the sun and, for a moment, the plants are eclipsed by shadow. I recall Mother’s last sculpture, a bas-relief. Birds of Paradise, chiseled in granite. “For Dad’s tombstone. Company for your father,” Mother said, when he died. “Something from home, now that he’s free.”

So death is both a catastrophe and the ultimate ticket to freedom—from what? Life? The shadow feels cold.

“Did you hear what I said, Miranda?” I yell back inside again.

“When I’m ready! I have to shower and do my makeup,” she says, stamping her bare foot on the floor—right in the puddle of bleach. “Shit,” she says, shuffling towards the bathroom.

Mom didn’t want to live after Dad died. She stopped sculpting, gardening, walking—even eating. Miranda wasn’t here then.

My eyes are heavy from exhaustion. I’m struggling to keep them open, but my body finally betrays me. An involuntary jerk sends my cup crashing down the steps. Mother’s Birds of Paradise have reappeared, vivid in full sun. Miranda is still in the bathroom.

I go back inside. “Times up. I’m going,” I yell, banging on the bathroom door.

“Can’t hear you. I’m in the shower.”

“Mother is dying, Miranda.”

“Who?”

“Mother!”

“Tell her I’m not dressed yet.”

I grab my backpack and race to the hospital. The white sun, earlier blasting on the windows of Mother’s room, has softened now. I open the drapes to allow the golden rays of sunset inside. Sitting beside Mother, I stroke her hand. She says nothing. Her last words were for Miranda, and Miranda still isn’t here. I kiss Mother and tell her how much I love her. Purple suffuses the clouds as the orange crested sun sinks fiery into the horizon. I watch transfixed, as colours merge and change. When I turn back to Mother, her body has become an empty shell. The then dark room turns her ashen face into a lifeless cast. Mother is gone.

Driving back home beside the lake, the azure water has tarnished to a deep pewter colour. Clouds obscure the moonlight and all of the earlier reflections. Soon I will come to the harbour and village, where Mother’s house is.

I am reminded that we will have to disperse Mother’s things—sooner rather than later. But I dread the day. Then her home will become simply another empty shell. A house, no longer occupied. A house without energy or life. Anyone’s house.

Right now, however, I dread confronting Miranda. She will scream at me for not waiting for her. She will blame me that she missed seeing Mother before she died. Twinges of guilt nip at my conscience. But, in my heart, I know Miranda would never have made it there on time. And I tried. I really did try to get her there.

The dark night has swallowed the last wisps of twilight. I open the door of Mother’s house, once again to be greeted by absence.

“Miranda?” I call into the silence. Not a single light is on. My eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness. Exhausted, I feel my way from one room to the next, hearing nothing and seeing nothing. I have no idea what I’m looking for.

“Miranda? Where are you?”

When I reach the back door to the porch, Mother’s garden looks even darker. I am at once struck by the uniformity of the darkness—nothing breaks or ripples.

Then suddenly I realize that the Birds of Paradise are gone. Kneeling down, I dig senselessly for their robust and fleshy roots. For any remnant of them—the rhizomes or stalks, anything. Only loose dirt lies in the bed.

“Miranda!” I scream, rushing back inside. I turn the lights on. Everything is gone. The house—an empty shell just like my mother.

November 2016

by Carol Jones

The worst part of purging the contents of my parents’ house was that my parents weren’t dead. Gone but not yet dead, I repeated, forcing myself to tackle another box, another closet, another drawer.

My husband and I piled the things we wanted to keep in the living room, the things to sell in the family room, and the things to donate in the garage. Everything else would go in a dumpster after the yard sale. We triaged nearly a century of memories, more if we counted the family heirlooms; and it felt obscene, handling their lives with our dirty hands. Every touch excruciating.

“Oh my God,” I said a hundred times, pulling another dusty memory from a shelf. “The decorations from my sweet sixteen cake! Can you believe it?” The plastic Cinderella coach with golden doodads, tarnished and yellowed, sailed through the air and into the trash can.

“What should I do with your father’s golf clubs?” my husband yelled from the garage.

“I don’t know; they’re left-handed clubs. Do we know any left-handed golfers?” I was thinking about their value. Not monetary—though they were surely pricey—but emotional. He had played golf every day before his stroke. He loved his clubs the way my daughter loved her stuffed animals. I imagined bringing them to the nursing home so he could cuddle with them, or hang them on his wall like found art. “Put them in the sell pile,” I said, feeling calluses form on my heart.

His stroke had been cruel. It took his left side. It took his gin rummy and his golf. It half-blinded him in both eyes so he couldn’t decipher his cheesy detective novels. Choking fears discontinued his popcorn. Only my mother and I understood his words. It gave him nothing in return, not even the peace of death.

My mother doted, protected like a she-wolf, with more care than I remembered her capable of. But even with all her positive thinking and her round-the-clock vigils, he didn’t get better. Instead, she got worse. She collapsed in on herself, like the first tower, foreshadowing things to come. We watched her crumble for over a year, until she functioned less than her patient.

It was the midnight phone call that clinched the deal.

“Are you busy?” my mother’s voice said as I came around from a dead sleep.

“At midnight? What’s wrong?” Now fully awake. The hint of disaster tapping on my consciousness.

“We had an accident.”

In the distance I heard my father’s slurred voice. “Hep me.”

“Jesus Christ!” I screamed into the receiver, furious with her casualness in the face of every emergency. Her martyr complex full on, determined to suffer her duty without being a burden. “On my way!”

I skipped a bathrobe—no time to search, the nightgown would do—and slipped my feet into tennis shoes. My husband followed at my back asking, “What? What?”

“I have no idea.” I was down the hall to the front door.

“Do you want me to come?”

“No, stay with the kids,” I said as I closed the door carefully, not to wake them. And then I was off, in the chilly night air of our quiet neighbourhood.

We had moved back for this purpose, around the corner, as if this night was predestined. This moment held all the significance of mortgage payments and property taxes on our convenient location. The culmination of an expected end.

I jogged down the driveway and across the street. Not a soul stirred, not a light shone other than the half moon, which barely cast a shadow over the darkened circle of homes. I had to choose between the longer street route or the shortcut through the neighbour’s pitch-dark side yard. I went short.

When I reached the hedge, I bent low, squeezing my eyes shut and pushing through the bushes where I had played with the neighbourhood kids. Our private desert island, where we shipwrecked regularly until dinnertime. The bushes felt denser; the darkness more intense than even our pirate imaginations.

Thorns snagged my cotton nightgown and pulled me back, like a warning from a childhood nightmare—do not leave the safety of the island—and then I emerged into my front yard, over whitecaps and frothy seas.

My whole life, they’d never moved. I left them, certain never to return. But their parental force pulled me back into the neighbourhood. Despite everything in the house behind me—my children, husband, furniture, landscaping, clothing, and two dogs—their home belonged to me in a way no other ever would. I scrambled across the wet grass to their driveway and looked to the door. It stood wide open, with light flooding the front step.

Legs in the wrong place, arms flailing. My mother on the stoop, trying to heave my father into a standing position. All around, light reflected off of glittering shards of broken glass. Everywhere. I looked for blood.

“What the hell?”

“He had a fall. Help me get him up.” He looked like an overturned turtle, one foot still inside.

“Dad? What the hell?”

“I know.” His voice was sweet, sincere. Apologetic. Resigned.

I braced myself against the stoop and reached for arms that once held me aloft. I pulled them, fearing I might break him; but his muscles tightened. He rose with my support, slowly, with glass falling off him and onto the concrete. His good leg shimmied, uncertain. My mother wrapped her arms around his waist as if her ninety pounds could lift his heft.

“I’ve got him,” I said, under the strain. He balanced. I put his bad arm over my shoulder and forced my right arm between my mother and his waist. I heaved his left side up one step; he managed the right into the front hall. I pivoted him and sat him on the chair, panting and feeling adrenaline surging. Still no blood. I had dislodged my mother when we squeezed through the door. I turned to see her already sweeping. Glass piled into a sparkling hill.

“Leave that and tell me what happened,” I said in the voice of an exasperated parent. She didn’t stop her sweeping. The window that lit the front hall, along the side of the front door, opened to the outside. Only a few shards of glass remained in the corners.

“Did you fall through the window?” Complete confusion followed this realization. “How?” Forty years in this house and no one had ever fallen through a window. My father smiled with half his mouth while shrugging with half his body.

“No dubbapane.” I understood him like I understood my two-year-old—accurately and always.

“Every other window is double paned. I had no idea this wasn’t,” I said. Forty years ago someone installed a single-ply, fixed window there. No wonder it frosted over every winter. My mother came inside to get a dustpan.

“Stop cleaning,” I begged. “What were you doing up at midnight?” Her routine was to turn off the TV after the nine o’clock news and guide his walker to the bedroom. Every night.

“We slept through the news.” She oozed guilt. “He got away from me.”

I had previously accused her of not using the walker at all times. I’d caught her hauling him to the bathroom draped across her back. It would have been so easy to make her suffer for this, but  she was already in much deeper circles of hell. She’d had to call me for help.

“Okay, besides the window, what are the damages? No cuts?” I scanned my father’s back and sides for blood. I looked over my mother’s hands and arms. Scratches. A scrape. “Broken bones?” Unlikely as he hadn’t howled when I hauled him up the step. Amazing.

“I bet there’ll be bruising. Do we go to the emergency room?” My father half shook his head. My mother deferred to her husband. They’d never consider calling an ambulance.

“First, I put you both to bed. Then I tape the window, then I check on you, then I go home,” I detailed my game plan. “Tomorrow morning we talk.”

I used a plastic tablecloth and duct tape over the window. I finished sweeping the shards into the garbage and by the time I checked their bed, they were asleep.

The real damage of the night was to my mother. She had insisted on her ability to be my father’s caregiver long after everyone could see the dangers. And then, as if to prove our point, he had lost his balance in the hall before passing through the plate-glass window. Divine intervention if ever there was. After my mother fired three homecare workers, I moved them to the nursing home. She understood there was no choice.

We took a few paintings, a favourite chair, my father’s hole-in-one trophy, and a framed photo of my two daughters to their new room. They left behind everything else. An embarrassment of crap. Their only child tasked with decampment, my husband playing the muscle, our children offering light distraction.

“Gr—oss!” said our seven-year-old, declaring every dusty item, musty pillow, and spider-egged, what-not shelf disgusting.

“This,” said our two-year-old, wanting every chipped crystal goblet, broken string of beads, and loose rhinestone gewgaw.

“No,” said my husband, only one step further than I from surrendering to the chaos.

It was not temp work. It was full-time hell. Weeks eclipsed days. A season passed before the realtor arrived.

“Most people hire professionals,” she said. “Did you find any treasures?”

“No,” I said, drained and done.

She took my grandfather’s hammer from the last pile of keeper items and hammered the For Sale sign into the lawn. The newness of the custom-made, double-pane window—with freshly painted trim—stood out beside the scratched front door and the crooked porch-light fixture, as if everything else now needed replacing.

An offer was submitted, countered, and accepted. We had a month until the closing, when their house—my house—would belong to another family. It felt as though we’d sold it out from under the proper owners.

Not once did my parents ask to go home. Not even to say goodbye. Not even to check on the precious contents as if all was safely entombed in the hereafter, awaiting their next life.

That was a bad month. I wept more than I slept. I wandered the vacant house, sometimes at night. I sat in the emptiness. I cried in the garage. I bleached the kitchen sink of our stains. I sought forgotten memories of holidays and heartbreaks, of prom dates and birthday parties. I filled my nose with the remaining smells, and memorized wallpaper patterns. Then I closed the front door for the last time.

It was a silly whim, triggered by the realtor’s question. Treasure?

One last voyage to the deserted island, over salty waves of freshly mowed lawn. I ducked beneath a bough and fought my way ashore. Spring leaves covered blue sky, and from the center of the thicket, I imagined a hurricane levelling the mainland, feeling all the fears we manufactured in youth. Lost at sea, orphaned, gone but not yet dead.

My hand located the rusted spade I stole from the garage thirty-five years ago. It had waited in a tree hollow a long time. I stabbed the dirt and dug in. From the hole, I lifted the box of treasure. I pushed through the hedge, sprinting through the neighbour’s yard, across the street and back to the world of utility bills and grocery lists.

I pried the lid open and dumped my treasure over the kitchen counter. There was a dampened pack of matches with gooey orange tips, dimes and quarters equalling eighty cents, a polished piece of Arizona turquoise, and a once-pink diary that was now a solid block of moldy paper—a gift from my eighth birthday party. With a careful hand and a butter knife, I managed to peel the cover from the inside page where a blue-ink inscription could still be read: “May your spirit of adventure never be lost at sea, Mommy and Daddy.” I suspected every other page was blank. I didn’t check.

I poured myself a grown-up drink and swept the pile of detritus into our junk drawer. I wondered when it would be purged and sorted, tossed as unceremoniously as the Cinderella coach that graced an angel-food cake a very long time ago.

February 2017

by Hege Anita Jakobsen Lepri

The lights in the interrogation room had been dimmed, making the laminate table look almost like real wood. She wasn’t quite sure when that had happened. Probably they’d done it in tiny increments so she wouldn’t notice. They knew how to transform a situation here.

It was the good cop’s turn if her calculations were right. She was thirsty but hopeful that the detective would bring water, maybe even coffee. She didn’t need to worry about the coffee keeping her up or making her hands shake.The digital clock on the wall read 11:09 with red LEDs. She couldn’t see the dot indicating a.m. or p.m.; but even without windows, she knew it was night. She had been awake for seventeen hours; and though her left eye had started twitching, she wasn’t about to break.

“You must be getting tired,” he said, carefully pulling his chair closer to the table.

She was softened by the normalcy of the gesture. The other, shorter cop used the chair as a prop. He’d pull it out, throw it around, scratch the rubber feet against the linoleum floor to see if she reacted to the sound—if that would push her closer to the edge. When he did sit on it, it would be backwards, like a cowboy on a horse.

“I’m okay,” she said, “probably wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.”

He locked into her gaze for a few seconds. She wondered if what he saw confirmed what he thought he knew about her. Her eyes were probably red from wearing her contacts too long, her eyelids heavy and swollen. She was past that age when anguish made you look doe-eyed and vulnerable. She no longer evoked the instinct to protect in anyone.

“I can get you some coffee,” he said, “or tea, if you prefer.” She nodded, relieved that she managed to predict what would happen for the first time in the past six hours.

“So what is it, tea or coffee?” he said with a half-smile.

“Tea, please,” she replied, immediately regretting she hadn’t said coffee. Tea was the most sensible choice if you wanted to come across as a balanced person. Tea with milk and sugar was for the Florence Nightingales of this world. But this cop was intelligent, maybe he saw through the façade she put up. Coffee would have been the honest choice, telling him clearly that she wasn’t lying. And it would have made her more alert.

When the tea appeared, he started on his questions again. She held her hands around the too-hot mug, exploring her thistle-dry mouth when he asked, “I wonder if you can clarify a few things for me?” That’s how he had started the previous two times. This time she didn’t even nod.

“We’ve talked about the woods behind your house,” he said. “Can you explain to me at what ages the children were allowed to go there?” She tried to sip a bit of tea, but the heat scalded the tip of her tongue.

“The woods are their playground. When they were little, we’d go there together every day. I try to give them an outdoor education, teach them to play with toys they find in nature. It’s healthier, I believe,” she said.

“You’re still not answering my question. I’m not interested in your child-rearing philosophy,” he said.

She sensed anger underneath the flat tone of his voice. Maybe he fell out of his role. Maybe reassuring didn’t come naturally to him. Maybe he too just wanted to go home. She followed his change of pace.

Her answer came so quickly she sounded snappy, “Since the kids turned five and seven. They had to check with me from time to time, but apart from that, they were free to play there as they pleased.”

“Five and seven,” he said. He looked at her attentively. “And you weren’t worried?”

If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have lectured him. Told him what the real dangers are. That bubble wrapping makes no one safe. She would have thrown in the statistics and told him mass media invented stranger danger. She had no trouble setting people straight when they asked. She knew what she was doing. But inside this room, there were other rules. She needed to keep it simple and not introduce new words that he could twist.

“What should I be worried about?” she replied, forcing herself into neutral gear.

“Well, I can think of a few: wild animals, pedophiles, abductions, that they’d hurt themselves and not be able to find their way home,” he replied, looking through his papers.

“It is only six acres, and it’s fenced.” Her words hung in the air.

He looked up to challenge her. “Six acres is clearly big enough, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, would we.”

They weren’t here because of the six acres of woodland; she knew that he knew that.

“But the kids are fine, you told me so yourself,” she said, raising her voice without intending to. She counted her heartbeats to calm down. One-two and an inhale-three-four and an exhale. She took her time.

He looked at her carefully. “According to your stepson, they weren’t as safe as you claim they were.”

She blushed, feeling the familiar spots on her neck. “He’s my son, I’ve told you over and over.” This is how they break you, she thought, asking the same question again and again, until words lose their meaning.

“We need to corroborate that information; I’m just repeating the account of your stepson.”

“He’s only eight. He’s got a vivid imagination. They sometimes play this game where they’re orphans—kids do that. Just ask my husband.” The exhaustion was beginning to show. Her voice sounded shrill.

“We haven’t been able to locate your husband yet. He’s on some kind of a business trip, isn’t he?” He flicked through the papers in front of him. “Orlando, was it?” He didn’t wait for her answer.

She had stopped putting her husband’s trips on the wall calendar. They were so frequent now that she marked the days he’d be home instead. Pink marker dots. She had said Orlando, but maybe that was wrong. It could be Atlanta or Calgary.

“As far as I remember, he went to Orlando,” she said. “Isn’t he answering his cell phone?” She knew he wouldn’t answer. Maybe they’d already intersected Frank and someone was interrogating him in a different room, in a different city. She looked at her hands. The pink nail polish she got for Mother’s Day was peeling off.

“You spend a lot of time alone, don’t you?” His voice was calm, understanding. A nice baritone. She knew it was a trick. What would be the safe answer? “Not really” would be a lie; he’d see right through that. The house was isolated. Frank travelled one-hundred-and-twenty days per year. Her parents were snowbirds in Florida half the year.

“Yes, I do” would be an admission of something, that she wasn’t happy, that something was wrong with their arrangement.

“I don’t mind being alone,” she said. He let her answer hang there a little, as if to see where it would take him.

“But spending so much time on your own, with the responsibility for the children all weighing on you, I’m sure it must be hard at times?” Again the deep melodic voice.

She wanted to tell him about how they played together—all three of them—stayed out all day and made huts out of twigs and moss, how they told stories of fauns and gnomes until the rain stopped. She wanted to tell him about hide-and-seek where the children always won and laughed at her goofiness. She wanted to recite the songs and nursery rhymes they’d made up, and describe how the children smelled of life itself when they came back from a day in the woods.

Instead she said, “It was a choice. I wanted to live there, give my children a real, once-upon-a-time-like childhood.” She spoke a little bit too fast to sound convincing.

She returned to looking down at the laminate table, still feeling his eyes on her. He cleared his voice.

“I know this was your choice,” he said, “but sometimes what we’ve chosen becomes too much of a burden, doesn’t it? We thought we wanted it, but then we don’t.” He paused.

The “we” threw her off. Does he have children of his own?

“And you homeschool, don’t you? So the kids are your responsibility all the time.” He looked at her hands for a moment. Then he cleared his voice. “Don’t you miss having me-time? Don’t you want to do something just for yourself ?

Breathe in, breathe out, centre your breath, she thought; but instead of calm inhales, there were hurried puffs of air. He was working her into a corner. She wasn’t sure which corner.

“I was happy,” she said sharply, then corrected herself, “I am happy. And the children are old enough to play on their own now, so there’s more time for me . . .”

His gaze was off her, like he wasn’t interested any longer. The attentiveness faded when she no longer filled in his blanks.

“My husband and I had agreed that it’s better they learn at their own pace and not be exposed to all the stuff, stuff that fills the wrong voids,” she said.

He didn’t pick up her thread. She heard him breathe, get ready for the next sequence of questions. He had all the time in the world. He was the hunter, she the prey.

“So you’re saying that while you got your me-time, your children were left unattended, roaming around in the woods.”

Her heart beat loudly now, in irregular bursts. “No,” she said, “that is not what I’m saying. I’m saying that when the school work was done, they played outside. They were old enough. I had taught them how to be safe.”

He wasted no time. “So essentially, they were out alone all afternoon, at six and eight years of age, while you were . . .” he cleared his voice, “while you were browsing the Internet?”

She couldn’t remember what she’d been doing during the afternoon. She may have been on the Internet, lesson planning, or reading a book. The kids had been inattentive all morning—she remembered that. They hadn’t finished their math lesson because they were in and out of their chairs all the time. She had let them go early. After that, it was all a blur. She shook her head, at herself and to his question.

He locked eyes with her. “Did you ever have thoughts of wanting the children to disappear, to be rid of them so you could do what you really wanted?” he asked.

“No!” She was yelling now. “No, I didn’t want my children to disappear, I loved them deeply . . .” She realized her error before finishing the sentence. She had to explain quickly now, before that single word was given too much importance. “I love them; I’ve built my life around them. I cook wholesome food to keep them healthy. I build a world they can explore and grow in, with real face-time instead of on a phone or computer. How could you even say that?” Her voice cracked, but she wasn’t crying.

She thought about that time last year, when they had been fighting all day about their toys, and she had sent them out in the rain and told them not to come back until they had made up.

“Your stepson told us that you sometimes don’t give him and his sister enough to eat. What do you have to say about that?”

The inside of her thighs had started itching. Too much time sitting still, worrying. She folded her hands in front of her to keep herself from scratching.

“Hans is my son, how many times do I have to say it!” Her voice was loud again, too loud and too high. Count, she thought. Count your breath.

She thought about the quinoa salad that they’d had for lunch, the pieces of apple and pear she had given them for snack. They hadn’t eaten much of either. She had figured they’d eat when they got hungry.

“The only time they’ve been hungry was for a school project. I wanted them to know how Aboriginal people lived, so for a day we lived off what we could find on the land. But the berries weren’t very filling, and there were no fish in our tiny creek. But it was just a day. They learned a lot from the experience.”

She felt safer now. When she just explained everything, he’d understand and let her go. There was nothing unaccounted for in her life. Not really.

“Your stepdaughter told the neighbour who found them that she was starving. She finished a whole cookie tin after she was let in.”

She blushed. “Greta is my daughter, please stop saying that,” she said quietly.

The cop didn’t react.

After a while, she added, “She isn’t used to refined sugars.  Of course she’d eat a whole tin of cookies if given the chance.”

The cop stayed silent. He was writing something in his file.

She rested her forehead in her hands, suddenly afraid they’d keep her all night. She was so tired of it all, the plain white face of the detective, his checked shirt, the laminate table, the hum from the digital clock on the wall.

“But the kids are all right,” she said, “so why are you keeping me?”

He looked at her for a long time, probably saw the graying roots of her red hair. She was supposed to fix that yesterday but never got around to it. The concealer she used for the dark circles under her eyes must have worn off by now. He was looking at a bad version of her.

“We need to know that the children will be safe before they are returned to you,” he said. “We may not lay charges, but even if what you say is proven to be correct, we have notified social services. We don’t take child neglect lightly.”

He shuffled his papers and then hit the stack against the table three times. “You may have to take some parenting classes. Hans and Greta will be put someplace safe for the time being.”

She didn’t want to weep. She wanted to turn the table on its side, make a ruckus and yell that they were all crazy. Instead a loud sob escaped her, like the yelp of a wolf.

“Why can’t I have my children back now? They were never really lost in the first place. If it weren’t for this neighbour, everything would be fine.”

He stood up. “Well, everything isn’t fine, is it? The kids knocked on the neighbour’s door. We can’t pretend like that never happened, can we?”

The itching was becoming unbearable. Even if the detective was still in the room, she put her hands under the table to scratch. “If they went to the neighbour in the tiny, red cottage down the lane—there’s something not quite right about her.”

He looked at her, coldly this time.

“The children already told us. Hans said that you told them to stay away from Mrs. Grimm. But children don’t do as you tell them, do they? That’s why you have to watch them.”

She closed her eyes, trying to pinpoint when things had started to go so wrong. Was it when she asked them to clean up their mess after lunch? Was it last week when she told Greta she couldn’t have an American Doll? Or was it that art project last year when they painted pebbles in luminescent colours, and Hans had a fit and threw them everywhere? She had plans for those pebbles; she imagined them glowing in the moonlight, guiding them home in the dark. She put her head on the table. The itch had reached her cheeks. They were burning like fire; and the cool, artificial wood offered only fleeting relief.

She could hear her heartbeat in her ears, fast and loud like a drumroll. Breathe! Breathe, or you will never get out. She paced herself.

One, two—buckle my shoe,

Three, four—open on the door,

Five, six—don’t fall for their tricks,

Seven, eight—set them straight.

She ran out of rhymes when the officer opened the door again.

“You’re free to leave,” he said, locking eyes with her briefly.

She couldn’t remember how she got into the interview room, but somehow her body knew exactly how to make its way out of the labyrinth of corridors. There were only a few cars still parked outside, and the moon shone directly onto her metallic silver roof at the far edge of the lot. Any other night she would have thought it was indicating the right way home.

March 2017

by Naomi Lakritz

“How are we doing today?”

“I’m fine. However, I can’t answer for you. You’ll have to decide for yourself how you are. I’m no judge of that. What’s your name? I can’t read it. They make these name tags so tiny nowadays.”

“Kayleigh.”

“I cannot imagine a future populated by people named Kayleigh or Breanne or Jayden. Those are names for perpetual children. My name is Mildred Mendelson. That is an adult’s name. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I’m glad I’m only twenty-two and not her. Don’t tell me different. If I were twenty-two and looking at me, I’d be thinking the same thing. The only reason I’m here, you know, is that the doctors think I have dementia. Just the early stages, mind you. They asked me who the prime minister is, and I said R. B. Bennett; so they put me in here. But that’s because I was thinking back to when I was just a little girl, and my grandmother Anna was a friend of R. B. Bennett. He had one of the first cars in Calgary, and he crashed it into a pole right near Isaac Freeze’s store on Stephen Avenue. He said he would never drive again. He was so embarrassed at all the crowds that gathered. That car, I believe it was a McLaughlin.

“But they pounce on every little thing, these doctors. They just want to put me away to make room in the world for younger people. I was taking up too much space, breathing too much of the air they had appropriated for themselves. The doctor asked me to draw a clock; but I didn’t do it well because I’m not an artist, not because there’s anything wrong with my mind. I got poor grades in art all through school. I couldn’t draw a ball properly in those days, but they didn’t put me away for it back then, did they?”

“Do you know where you are, Mrs. Mendelson?”

“I’m in this chair, for God’s sake. I’m in Lilac Haven. Why do they call it Lilac Haven when there isn’t a lilac bush on the property? And it’s certainly no haven, either. Such trivia. I was talking about something else. You should have seen the fuss my niece, Stefanie, made because I drove my car off the road one time. It was only because I was distracted. I was thinking of my first crush, this boy named Barry with black hair and blue eyes, who sat next to me in ninth-grade science class. And suddenly while I was driving, I thought about Barry and wondered where he is today.”

“What did he end up doing?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have driven off the road, would I? For all I know, he’s been taking the big dirt nap all these years. Maybe an aneurysm got him at fifty. Oh, and then Stefanie got mad at me because my house was a little untidy. She practically shouted at me, ‘You can’t live alone anymore!’ I said, ‘Stefanie, if I were forty and my house were a little messy, you’d be polite enough to keep your mouth shut. But because I’m ninety, you think I’ve gone flaky.’ Stefanie is definitely my late sister’s child. Sonia was always very brusque like that. She and I didn’t get along much. But I’ve always hated housework anyway. Ask Jack.”

“Mildred, Jack is no longer with us.”

“Who’s he with?”

“He passed on fifteen years ago.”

“What did he pass on? His chance to continue living with me? Well, I’m not crazy. You know who is, though—Minna Lowenstein. Every Friday, she would bake challah for her husband, Max, who is dead. And then one day, the rabbi came by for Shabbat services and she told him, ‘Rabbi, I need advice. Every Friday, I bake challah for my late husband, Max. But now, Max has told me he’s met another woman in the world to come. Tell me, Rabbi, should I keep baking challahs for him?’ And the rabbi said, ‘Yes, you should, because it might not work out between them.’ So, she baked challahs. Two Fridays later the rabbi is there again, and Minna rushes over to him. ‘Rabbi,’ she says, ‘you were right! It didn’t work out! He’s back with me!’ She was glad she hadn’t deprived that cheating Max of his challahs after all.”

“I’m sure Max is watching over her from heaven. Just as Jack is watching over you.”

“I certainly hope not! There are certain bodily functions I wouldn’t want Jack to see me performing, dead or alive. You know who else is crazy—Mary Turner. She said to me yesterday, ‘Mildred, do you think I’m going flaky? I saw these little men all dressed in red like the guards at Buckingham Palace; they came in under the door and cleaned up my whole room! Mildred, am I flaky?’ I told her, ‘Who cares if you’re flaky, Mary? Your room is !’”

“Do you know what day it is today, Mildred?”

“No. Nor does it matter. All the days are the same in here.”

“It’s Wednesday. We’re going to be making Hanukkah decorations in the social hall.”

“You think I want to do that kindergarten stuff just because I’m old? I never liked it when I was in kindergarten, why would I like it now? I don’t want to be infantilized. I want to read The Economist. Jack always subscribed.”

“Stefanie will bring it when she comes.”

“I think it was in The Economist that I read this story about the latest study on aging. These scientists asked a group of people in their seventies to think of themselves as age thirty-five. When they did, their bodies actually became healthier; their aches and pains went away, and they visited the doctor much less than another group of seventy-year-olds who were told to think of themselves as being their right age.”

“Do you want to try it?”

“Well, if I could start over in my memory thinking of myself as going through my life all over again, day by day, I could make my body believe it’s at all those ages. Then, I could live to one hundred and eighty because it would take me another ninety years to imagine myself in my life again.”

“Where would you start?”

“At age one. That’s my first memory. I was at my grandmother’s apartment. She lived in the Hillhurst neighbourhood. That was practically the outskirts of the city then. You could smell the Bow River from the open windows. Some other people were there, too. Don’t ask me who they were. Nobody introduces guests to a child of one. The carpet was a drab yellow-gold; and I was standing up, clutching the edge of a bloated and very ugly purple chair. I was so little that I could see straight underneath the hanging folds of the white cloth on the dining-room table. I saw ladies’ legs in high heels on the other side. My father was kneeling down, beckoning me to walk to him: ‘Walk to me. Come on. You can do it.’ I didn’t think I could do it. The carpet was a dizzy desert of yellow. But, I let go of the chair, took two shaky steps, was suddenly overwhelmed with vertigo from that carpet, and fell forward on my hands as babies do. Everyone in the room laughed at me, and I felt my face burn with humiliation and shame.”

“That sounds like a cool memory. Very few people can remember back that far. I know I can’t.”

“It is not a ‘cool’ memory. It’s a devastating one. It shows you that babies have feelings which nobody gives them any credit for having. Remember that, next time you laugh at a baby who’s trying to walk.”

“Why are you crying? What’s the matter? Here, would you like a tissue?”

“It’s struck me. It was the first devastating moment in a world of hurt piled on hurt, humiliation on humiliation. My introduction to the world of my fellow human beings—at only age one.”

“Is there something happier that you can think of instead?”

“You start out alone, and you end alone.”

“Life is like that for everyone, Mildred.”

“Yes, but it’s happening to me. To me, you understand. It has happened to millions of people before me, but I wasn’t experiencing their pain. Do you know what the children in my grade school class called me? The science teacher, Mrs. Gold, was talking to us about mildew; and so my friend Shirley started calling me Mildew instead of Mildred. I was never Millie, by the way. I always hated that sobriquet. My best friend turned on me, and all the children took it up! I was forever Mildew after that. My sister, Sonia, had a much prettier name than I did.”

“That was cruel of those children.”

“Don’t just parrot things. Say something original if you’re capable of it. Then, in high school, oh, the girls were so mean to one another. How can anybody think that if women were in charge, they’d fix everything that’s wrong with governments and the world? They wouldn’t! They’d scratch each other’s eyes out and  backstab—they’d do each other dirt.”

“But you got married and had children. Those were happy times.”

“You’re mistaking me for someone else in here. Do all old ladies look alike? Do you mix us up? I had four miscarriages. I never had any children who survived. And now Jack is gone, too. Maybe if I’d married Barry, things would have been different.”

“Everybody wonders those things.”

“No, everybody does not wonder those things. They don’t wonder what would have happened if I’d married Barry instead of Jack. Nobody’s ever heard of me or Jack or Barry. And soon, we’ll all be forgotten. Do you know that I used to drive my friends to the Foothills Hospital? One day Stefanie took me there because I sprained my ankle. The nurse saw that I was old. I was eighty-seven. She said, ‘Do you come here often?’ I said, ‘No, but I bring my friends here a lot.’ And now, look at me, look where I am.”

“Would you like me to bring something to calm you? The doctor left a note on your chart that you could have Ativan if you need it.”

“There’s nothing that can calm me. Life isn’t calm, Kayleigh. Have you ever looked around and wondered how you got to be where you are? Sometimes, I do. Why am I living in Calgary? Because my parents immigrated here from Russia. Because they believed what Clifford Sifton told them about Canada being a golden land. I know you’ve never heard of Clifford Sifton. Nobody has anymore. Nobody knows history from borscht, as my father used to say. My parents ran a grocery store. Kids used to phone the store. They’d say, ‘Have you got Prince Albert in a can?’ My father would reply, ‘Yes, we do,’ and the kids would say, ‘Well, let him out!’ But why wasn’t I born the daughter of rich horse breeders in Virginia? Or someone in a shanty in Appalachia? Or Mary Pickford? I’m sure you’ve never heard of her, either. Where are all these dead people now? Where did they go, Clifford Sifton, R. B. Bennett, my parents, Jack? It must be very crowded and noisy wherever they are; there are so many people there.

“Although, I don’t think I’d like to be one of the people in those crowds of thousands of protesters in Third World countries. I see pictures of people in magazines and I think, who are these people? What are their names? What are their lives about? And why wasn’t I born one of them, instead of ending up as Mildred Mendelson? Just what the mercy is going on with all that? Who decides such things?”

“That’s the big mystery of all time.”

“What an inadequate thing to say. You’re only twenty-two, so you can’t possibly understand. I was already old when you were born. Do you know who I am, who all of us are in this place? We are people from a few years ago. That’s who we are. Do you know that Clifford Sifton was Minister of the Interior under Laurier? Surely to God, you know who Laurier was.”

“Wouldn’t you like to help make Hanukkah decorations? It might take your mind off things.”

“That is a very hard thing to task Hanukkah decorations with—the duty of taking my mind off the great mysteries of life. Is Stefanie coming today?”

“I’m sure she will. She’ll bring you The Economist. Do you want me to wheel you back to your room, so you can rest up for her visit?”

“No. Wheel me to the social hall. I had better help with Hanukkah decorations, just in case Jack is watching me from the world to come. He might think it would do me good. I don’t want to upset him if he is somehow alive somewhere. I don’t want to hurt him. There’s already too much hurt in the world. I want them to be able to say of me that I didn’t cause more hurt and more pain. Do you think I’ve achieved that?”

“Of course you have. Why, what’s the matter all of a sudden? We’re going to have a lot of fun decorating for Hanukkah, aren’t we?”

“We, we, we. Who are we?”

April 2017

by Karin Aurino

I have this perfect life—a perfect husband, three happy children, a beautiful home in the City of Angels—even the neighbours are nice. So why am I hiding in my bedroom? Because everything that was good, has somehow turned bad. So I’ll stay upstairs. Problem solved.

Downstairs, my husband will be drinking a glass of wine while making dinner. It’s his turn to cook and he’ll be half into that bottle already. He’ll pour me a glass of red like he does every night. Fine wine—one of the first things we invested in when we started making our mark on the world.

It’s not a problem, but I stopped drinking today. Well, it’s early, so we’ll see. I’m not an alcoholic, but something happened recently, maybe a month ago. Something not so perfect. I don’t talk about it.

Still stranded in my bedroom, the ocean is five miles away, and there is a salty breeze off the second-floor balcony. It’s glorious. If I go downstairs, I’ll see it there on the marble island in the middle of our French country kitchen, frothy bubbles resting on the freshly poured glass of cabernet with its rich, woody aroma. I’ll pick it up as I have each night for the last ten years and take a sip.

I don’t want to take a sip. I want to take a break from all the sips. And there are reasons. I want to sleep at night. I want my headaches to go away. I don’t want to be short-tempered. I don’t want to worry about getting in my car and driving and getting pulled over and not passing the sobriety test and going to jail and waiting for my husband to post bail, even though I am only mildly muddled—not drunk. Not drunk because I have a high tolerance, something I used to be proud of.

I don’t want my children to get the wrong impression of their mother. Or maybe the right one. I go downstairs.

Day One: Pounding Headache

Day one is a Monday. It’s hard. You would think that it wouldn’t be because I’m hung over. But everyone knows about hair of the dog. It bit me hard, punctuating another blemish on my liver. And now I need that drink to take the edge off. At least that’s what I’ve programmed myself to believe.

There are so many things that are wrong with Monday. People who commit suicide almost always do it on Monday. Evil Monday. Nine to fivers must go back to work. Students must return to school. Parents must drive their children to school, to sports, to activities, to play dates, make their breakfast, help them get dressed, and remind them to brush their teeth. Responsible things happen on a Monday, and you are accountable for them. I am accountable for them. So I begin my day making sack lunches by smearing organic peanut butter on a two-pound piece of twelve-grain bread and placing it in a clear, recyclable container until my eight-year-old son trots into the kitchen and reminds me the school is nut free.

Day Two: Shaky and Weary

At night I begin reading to my youngest daughter her favourite children’s book while we are curled up in her little bed where a painted mural filled with rainbows and fairies and unicorns hovers above us. We are body to body, snuggling together.

“If you give a pig a pancake, she’ll want some syrup to go with it.”

My thoughts take me to that place of sin. If you give a drunk a drink, she’ll want another to go with it.

She says between tinkling giggles, “Keep going, Mommy.” I have read it to each of my three children over a hundred times. My fingers are shaking ever so slightly as I try to turn the page.

Has my daughter noticed? I ask her to turn the pages for me, and I go on, “She’ll probably get all sticky, so she’ll want to take a bath.”

She’ll probably get all sloppy, so she’ll want to take a nap.

Day Three: Sweaty and Contentious

I love my children dearly, but I have lost myself and my life to theirs, favouring the helicopter-parenting approach. I have lost my freedom, chained to their every need or desire placed well ahead of my own, my career in publicity a distant memory in favour of becoming a stay-at-home mom. After years with babies and toddlers, my communication skills have dwindled to one and two-syllable words.

While at a cocktail party on the pristine lawn of a school parent’s majestic home on the Bluff overlooking the Pacific, a woman in a tailored business suit asks me what I do for a living. My answer is, “I take care of my children.” Her response, “Oh.” An awkward pause is followed by a hint of condescension, “The noblest of professions. Our children need more like you.”

She moves on because she is afraid I will have nothing to contribute to an adult conversation, as though I don’t read or watch the news or understand what it means to have a job. So I struggle. I struggle because I don’t have a reason for the amount I drink or how often I drink. There is no reason.

I have a good life.

I have a great life.

I have an almost perfect life.

Yet each day I struggle. I struggle because picking up a glass of wine with dinner is a habit, like checking your cell each morning when you wake up. It’s part of the routine. Yet my habit had extended into the afternoon when I came home from picking up the kids. I would pour a glass of sauvignon blanc, convincing myself it was like an afternoon in Martha’s Vineyard—a happy time, a youthful time—and it would take me to a better place, take the edge off.

It did take the edge off, except I’ve never been to Martha’s Vineyard.

Day Six: Exhausted and Sore

Day six is a Saturday, and I’ve convinced my neighbour to take my kids for a play date at their house so that I have a quiet break. My husband’s friend Ted, who remains single and childless and hides a gut that hangs over khaki pants with a pink polo, stops by to show us his weed. In the kitchen, huddled around the cold marble island, he says, “The latest method of transport for inhaling weed is genius. There’s no down side now. Because the toxins have been removed and there’s some sort of filtration system, the benefit for patients with medical needs is all good.”

I’m wondering what his medical needs are. Ted proceeds with a demonstration by igniting the grassy marijuana in the tube. I lean in and take a big sniff.

My husband is leading-man handsome with hazel-green eyes and shiny hair as dark as the black crayon. He is an entertainment lawyer at a top firm and is known as their master debater. At home he lives in blue jeans and $50 t-shirts. He looks over at me, “What are you doing?”

It’s glorious, my eyes glassy from remembering. “Give me a break, I’ve been sober for six days. It’s not like I took a hit off a joint or anything. Tell him, Ted. It’s all good.”

My husband sits back like a black-robed judge and hands down his sentence, “It’s exactly like taking a hit off a joint. It’s not good. Pot is the gateway drug.”

Ted says, “Dude, nobody calls it pot anymore.”

“Well, nobody says dude anymore.”

“Yes they do.” Ted smoothes his sandy blond hair with a perfectly manicured hand.

“I have all kinds of drugs upstairs in my medicine cabinet,” I say to my husband, “and you don’t see me taking those, do you?”

“Really?” Ted asks. “Like, what kind of drugs?”

“Those are expired prescription drugs,” my husband says, “from when you gave birth three years ago.”

“No they’re not. That’s a sell-by date. And I can start taking some of that Vicodin right now if I wanted to, but I don’t.” I make a face. “I don’t want to get addicted.”

“Hey, uh, I could probably take those off your hands,” Ted offers. “I mean, you know, if you’re not taking them and all.” He looks at my husband, “Dude.”

Day Ten: Still Obsessing

It wouldn’t be so bad, but I just had lunch with my closest friend for her birthday. Her other friend Cameron, who reminds me of Peppermint Patty with her auburn hair and freckles and tomboy attitude, joined us at Ivy at the Shore. She ordered a glass of white wine while we sat on the floral-cushioned, wicker chairs and forgot to notice the ocean. It was called Honeydew or Honeybee or something that started with Honey. She kept talking about it because she had liked the name of it, though none of us could remember what it was. I began staring at it, its colour deep and rich, the colour of honey. It was silky and smooooth. I could feeeel it in my mouth because I know the taste of a fine white so well. It was as if I was having that glass of wine, but I wasn’t. Peppermint Patty was bubbly when she said, “It’s so delicious; you have to try it.”

I didn’t try it, but my best friend did. She’s a former swimsuit model who still has that amazing just-off-the-beach look—tan, long blonde hair, blue eyes. Perfect. And then she ordered a glass for herself. “Get one with me,” she said. “We’re celebrating.”

“I have to pick up the kids!” It came out loud and harsh, unexpected. The thought of getting behind the wheel again after a few rounds lingered in my head, over and over, especially after what happened. But I don’t talk about it.

“Me too. Are you okay?”

Not wanting to draw attention to not drinking only made it worse. I didn’t want to talk about it with my best friend who I’ve been drinking with for a dozen years, longer than we’ve known our husbands. How could I put a dent in us or ruin our fun foursome. “I think I’m getting another migraine, so I’d better not.”

She made a sad face, “Poor honey.”

I felt left out. Would one little sip really matter? One little glass? Now I can’t get that yummy smell of honey-something out of my head.

Day Twelve: Sanctimonious and Absurd

A Friday. A dozen days of detox. On the twelfth day of sobriety my true love gave to me . . . a night with the kids while he goes out drinking with his golf buddies. I’m glad he is off having a good time with his friends. He rarely does, and it gives me a little peace after the kids go to bed. I can read. I can write. I can sleep.

I can have my twelfth glass of water.

I was telling my husband this morning before he went to work that I cannot in good faith call myself an alcoholic. “I’m just taking a break so I can sleep better and drop a couple pounds.” I said this partly because he does not see me as an alcoholic. He can’t. I won’t let him; if he does, then I will be a different person to him. I will be defined by it. So much of our past will be different. It will be seen through the eyes of a person who did something wrong all those years, because each memory has a drink attached to it. All of those beautiful memories that we have together will be associated with a flaw, or worse, a disease. Isn’t that what it’s called?

In the master bath he straightened his tie and pecked me on the cheek, “Definitely. It’s good to take breaks. And you have been sleeping better.” He smiled, “Less snoring.” Then he patted my ass on the way out. It only jiggled a little, so I ignored the giant scale poking out from under some dirty laundry spilled out from the basket.

I don’t want to be a person with a disease.

Since I am in charge of whether or not I claim to be an alcoholic (just answer “no” to all the leading questions on the AA brochure), I choose not to be. Therefore, I do not have a disease.

Telling my husband that I am not an alcoholic saves him from considering whether he is one too. He drinks more than I did. But we can both stop at any time. I did. I stopped twelve days ago. I tell myself it is easy to stop. I do it all the time. I say I am not an alcoholic because the words “I don’t drink” don’t sit well on my tongue. It isn’t natural. I can always go back knowing that I can always stop. I can stop knowing that I can always go back.

I can always stop if I need a good night’s sleep or unblemished speech or full faculties or stress-free driving. I can always stop. But we have a large collection of wines in our cellar and in our rented locker on Pontius Way off Sepulveda. Excuse number one: wine is an investment. Excuse number two: wine collecting is prestigious. Excuse number three: it tastes good. What can I do? Let my husband drink it all?

No way.

I can start any time because I can stop any time. It’s not like fried foods. We force ourselves to develop a taste for fat. Stop eating all fried foods for two weeks. It’s hard to do. I know because I did it. The cravings are unbearable, the way your eyes will light up when a plate of fries walks by your table at a restaurant, the smell wafting into your nose. Your mouth will salivate like Pavlov’s dog. But once you rid your system of fried foods, I promise you the next time you reach for that chicken nugget it will taste disgusting. You will have to train your body all over again to enjoy that nasty, greasy, artery-clogging fat.

Wine isn’t like that. Once you train your palate to appreciate a perfect, 100-point wine it will stay with you for life. It’s true that you will have ruined yourself for the cheap wines. You cannot go back to Trader Joe’s two-buck chuck because it will taste so bad that it will cause a gag reflex.

When I sip from a glass of 1986 Châtaeu Lafite Rothschild, it feels like a slice of heaven has descended onto my tongue and elevated my spirit to a place unknown to humankind. That will never go away, like a good childhood memory that leaves a lasting impression. And I dream about it. I relive it.

Day 13: Saturday

I ordered sparkling water. The restaurant, famous for its Kobe steak and red-padded booths, was crowded and noisy. The server dressed in black vest and tie brought the bottle to our table for my husband to approve. He pulled his wine opener from his pocket and pierced the cork. The silver screw made a delicate squeaking noise as it descended, audible only to our table’s ears. The cork made a perfect popping sound when released from the bottle. The slightest billow of smoky vapour loomed above its throat. A slender amount of the rich red was carefully poured into my husband’s glass. He swirled it round and round, then moved it to his nose. My mouth watered while I imagined enjoying the aroma as he did. My lips parted as he placed it to his lips and took a gentle sip. He swished it around on his tongue, and I moved my jaw with his. My husband nodded his approval, and the wine was poured into my glass before I could reach my hand out in protest.

I stared at it. I reached for it like an old lover who you forgot had left you and didn’t want you anymore. I thought I would swirl it round and simply inhale its vibrant splendor and be done with it. But alas, the next step after the sniff was a natural progression onto my tongue. So I took a long, loving sip.

Instantly my senses came alive. My eyes brightened, my sinuses cleared, my ears tingled, and my taste buds exploded. My entire body relaxed deep into that slippery, leather seat. My soul rose high above me, floating graciously over our table. My husband proposed a toast, oblivious to my failure. As my eyes glazed over, the rest of the glass went down easy, and suddenly life was perfect again.

And that was it.

The ritual of enjoying a bottle of wine is sensuous, and the taste is as seductive as the desire to drink it. It’s second nature, like driving a car—you get in and turn the key. The next thing you know, you’re gliding along in traffic, or you’re easing the liquid down your throat. It’s second nature, until the officer pulls you over and shines a flashlight in your eyes and asks you for your license and registration and makes you get out of the car and you stumble on a slope and he tilts his head. And then he takes all the fun away. I don’t like to talk about it.

It wasn’t worth it—that glass of red—or was it? It didn’t taste good. Yes, the taste was good, but the taste of failure left on my tongue was bad. The bad taste of breaking sobriety yet again will linger longer than the succulent, oaky flavour of the cabernet. Heads turned in the restaurant when I fought with my husband, and it was ugly. We fought over nothing I remember—the accumulation of little irritations. I had wanted him to stop me, but he had no way of knowing this. I blamed him, yet it wasn’t his fault. Later, that glass of wine made me angry and then sad. The only thing left are tears. I have failed. Again.

Now I have to start all over again.

Day 13. Saturday. Stupid Saturday. Unlucky 13.

The twin bed creaks beneath my weight. Holding onto her tightly, I read to my perfect little girl, “Feeling sticky will remind her of your favourite maple syrup. She’ll probably ask you for some.” She giggles, knowing what’s next, “And chances are, if she asks you for some syrup, she’ll want a pancake to go with it.”

I look into her innocent eyes and know that one day my children will be old enough to understand.

Feeling flawed will remind her of her favourite glass of wine. She’ll probably ask you for some. And chances are, if she asks you for some wine, she’ll want the whole bottle to go with it.

I tuck her in and kiss her goodnight. The room is dark except for the flashing red light. It is always followed by the sound of the officer’s footsteps echoing on the pavement. I feel another migraine sprouting when he shines the blinding light in my eyes. The tube I blew into was faulty so it was easy for the lawyer, my husband’s friend, to make it all go away. But it didn’t go away. It haunts me, and I need to talk about it.

Day One: Sunday. Clarity and Hope

I walk into the master bath and close the door behind me. My husband is naked. He has just turned on the shower. I embrace him, locking my fingers around his waist, and rest my cheek against his chest. He holds onto me, and I understand my life doesn’t need to be perfect. Maybe it shouldn’t be.

“I need your help,” I whisper.

August 2017

by Jennifer Marr

“Well, aren’t you turning into a little lady.” The doctor glances at my chest, then makes note of something on his pad. He turns to my mother. “Have you given any further thought to sterilization?”

“My husband and I wonder if maybe we should hold off until she gets her first period? See how we handle it?”

“In my opinion, it’s easier to get it over with now.” The doctor grabs my legs and stretches them out like a Thanksgiving wishbone. “She’s doing well. Gained some weight and is less stiff through the pelvis. It’s been good for her to get out there on her bike.” The doctor winks at me.

Can I put my pants back on now?

“I see she’s still not as verbal as we’d like.” He makes another note on his pad.

“She watches everything. Doesn’t even fall asleep in the car!”

Mother loves to brag about how alert I am.

The doctor laughs, “Maybe she’ll be a trucker like her daddy.”

The highway’s packed coming out of the city. By the time we reach The Big K, there are six rigs parked in the lot and two more at the pumps. Good thing Kat knows to keep our table open on appointment days.

Kat’s amazing. She has long, red fingernails that never chip, even though she’s always cooking and waiting tables. And she knows how to do my hair up in a French braid.

Mom angles me a look. “She’ll be too busy to mess around with your hair, so don’t get your hopes up.”

We step inside, and I am at peace—wrapped in a blanket of laughter, conversation, and thick-cut fries. I could live at The Big K.

Kat comes over and gives me a hug. “The usual, honey?”

I point at the green milkshake mixer on the counter.

Mom steps in, “And a milkshake. Chocolate, please.”

“You got it,” Kat rushes back into the din.

Mom takes a deep breath, then picks a misplaced sugar packet out of the Sweet’N Lows. She looks over at me. “I gotta work late tomorrow night. Belinda’s gonna have you over for dinner.”

“Nnnnnnaaaaaaa!” My guts cramp.

“Sorry, Mel. I know you hate it when I work late.”

I scooch forward on my seat and use the table to push myself up, then angle my body towards my walker and look over at the washrooms.

“I’ll come check on ya if you’re not back in ten minutes, ‘kay?”

Oh yes, mother. Please do.

I wedge my walker through the bathroom door and catch the familiar stench of Javex and moth balls.

I position myself next to the grab bar by the toilet and inch my ass down onto the seat. Almost immediately, I regret it. My stomach is churning. There’s no way I’ll ever get back up in time to spew into the garbage pail, or even the sink.

You’re such a retard, Mel.

I grab a handful of toilet paper and shove it into my lap. A swell of nausea hits hard. I swallow it down.

I’m terrified of my own body. My face grows cold with sweat. I focus in on the steady drip of the sink faucet; and after a few minutes, my heartbeat slows. I hate puking more than anything in the world. Mom says it’s the body’s way of protecting itself. To me it’s just the pain of exposing what should only ever remain hidden.

Belinda holds the screen door open while I tilt my walker up and over the threshold. “How’s my sweet girl today? Ready for some yummy food?”

I’m not a fucking toddler, Belinda.

The windows steam from the heat of the stove. “Steve!” Belinda shouts. “Get your ass in here!”

Steve appears with messy hair and tired eyes. He sits down in the chair across from mine while Belinda dishes out the chicken and gravy. It spreads like vomit on the plate. Steve takes a big, glistening bite and chews it with his mouth open.

Ever hear of manners, asshole?

The room is quiet, except for the sound of scraping cutlery. I stare down at my plate and poke at a piece of chicken with my fork.

Belinda looks over at me. “You never eat anything. And you’re so skinny! What does your mother feed you?”

Steve pulls the fork out of his mouth. A long strand of drool stretches from it like a tightrope. “What, you think we should call Children’s Aid on John and Deb?”

Belinda looks down at her plate. “When they die, she’ll end up in someone else’s care anyway.”

Steve wads a napkin up into his fist. “We’ve known them for over twenty years.” His voice softens, “‘Sides, when they die, she’ll come live with us.”

My left hand tightens.

“It’s just that she seems so anxious half the time.” Belinda turns her attention back to eating. “Maybe that’s just the way it is for her, you know, because of her condition.”

Belinda gets stuck with the dishes while Steve leads me into the living room. He sits me down and stares at my braced-up legs hanging off the end of the couch, then walks over and presses play on the VCR.

“Pink Floyd: The Wall ” appears in scrawling red letters on the TV.

“For your viewing pleasure . . . and education.” He laughs. “Not that you need any, right Mel?”

I don’t know what the fuck you mean, Steve.

I’d die to get an education in a real classroom. Clapping along to nursery rhymes in the school’s basement doesn’t count.

He squeezes his ass down next to mine. A man loads his gun on screen.

“Belinda thinks you’re a retard,” Steve whispers, reeking of booze and gravy. “Doesn’t get you like I do. You don’t say anything, but you’re a genius. She just opens her yap about every little thing. The gate swings wide, but the cows don’t care. They just look at it ‘n’ moo.”

I keep my eyes on the TV as Steve runs his hand up my thigh. “You’re just a sweet little girl underneath it all. Aren’t ya, Mel?”

Mom drives me home from Steve and Belinda’s, and all I can think about is that part in The Wall when children fall into the meat grinder.

“You okay, Mel?”

No.

We pull into our driveway and there’s Dad, standing on the porch, his arms outstretched and a look of pretend shock on his face. “Melissa! Didn’t expect to see you today! Delivered your shipment of kickass early, did ya?”

Mom gives him that look—the one that tells him to stop saying words like “ass” in front of me.

He ignores her and sets off for the bike shed.

“She’s exhausted!” Mom lifts my walker out of the trunk before coming around to unbuckle my seatbelt.

“I think what you mean, Deborah, is that you’re exhausted!” He gestures for me to follow him into the backyard.

“At least wait until it’s light out! What if—”

“What if what, Deb? You don’t think our daughter has the right to fall off a fuckin’ bike!”

Dad walks over to his truck. He opens the door, leans in, and turns the key. Silver-white high beams blast the yard. He grabs a handful of cassettes from the dash then holds them up, one by one, so that I can choose. I point to what is undisputedly the greatest album of the year: Aerosmith’s Pump.

“Sure you don’t want New Kids on the Block?” Dad teases as he shoves the tape into the player, B-side first. “Now. We need to fuel those engines.” He kneels down in front of my braced-up legs and rips open the straps.

The shiny, red cruiser bike stands before us on the grass, propped up against the shed. Its handlebars glow white hot in the light of the truck. I tilt the bike sideways, towards my hip. I breathe in deeply, psyching myself up enough to lift my foot off the ground. Steven Tyler’s voice shoots me full of adrenaline.

“Who needs training wheels, right kid?”

I do!

“Just remember. You are in total control of that bike. You lean one way, it leans the other.”

I ease myself up onto the seat and stretch my arms out straight, like I’m riding a Harley.

“Do exactly what you did before. No training wheels, no difference.”

I push off with my right leg. The bike rolls forward.

“Feet on the pedals, kid. Drive it!”

I struggle to lift my feet up high enough. After an agonizing moment, my right foot hits the pedal. Then, with almost no effort at all, my left foot catches the upswing.

“Fuck yeah, Mel!” Dad is a light-streaked blur as I circle around him. “Giv’er some gas!”

I push down hard with my right leg. My left leg shoots up as I burn like hell out of the backyard.

I’m not going to school today. The thought of getting on that bus—all the kids staring while the driver makes a big deal out of me climbing the stairs as if I’d conquered Mount Everest—fuck it.

Dad’s truck is gone. Mom leaves for work in a few minutes. They trust me enough to get my ass out the door. I live for that little stretch of time, when I get to be alone.

“Have a good day, Mel! Don’t forget, Belinda’s picking you up after school!”

I wait until her car disappears, then head straight for the bike shed. I park my walker on the grass outside. It doesn’t fit through the door, but that’s fine.

Holding onto Dad’s bike for support, I shuffle my way across the dirt floor. If I fall, I’m screwed. Can’t get up when you can’t bend your knees. I lean forward and loosen the straps on my braces, just in case. I don’t give a shit if my legs grow crooked. If I can loosen my braces to board the bus, I can loosen them to kick some ass.

The bus pulls up to our driveway, just as I manage to poke my front wheel out into the sunshine. The driver sits there for a minute, looking around. She cranes her neck out the window. I stand completely still, camouflaged by the shadows in the doorway, until the coast is clear.

I walk my bike out to the sidewalk. My leg trembles as I lift it over the crossbar. I remember what Dad said, that I am in total control. I push off and plant my feet firmly on the pedals.

I round the corner and see Steve exactly where I think he’ll be, sitting in a lawn chair on his front porch, beer in hand.

“Mel? That you?”

I grip the handlebars so tight that my knuckles hurt.

He stumbles onto the lawn. “Holy hell, girl!”

I speed up and my legs burn, but I don’t slow down.

September 2017

by Sonal Champsee

“Your Ammaji is coming tonight,” said Mom. “Your grandmother.” She’d been counting down the days for me.

I was excited because I’d learned all about grandmothers in school. We were doing a unit on family trees. I had a green, construction paper tree—the trunk split into two branches, and then each branch split into two more. Eight branches. In the middle, where everything came together, was me. I was happy there was no room for my brother Amit on this tree. It was mine and mine alone.

We were supposed to put pictures of ourselves and then our parents and our grandparents on the tree, but that part was hard because I didn’t have any pictures of my grandparents. Mom and Dad had some black-and-white ones in the photo album, but they didn’t let me take them to school. I had to leave that part blank, and hope that I didn’t get in trouble for not finishing my homework.They were small pictures, with my grandmother and grandfather sitting stiffly beside each other, wearing Indian clothes. Other kids had colour pictures of grandmothers smiling with teeth showing, grandfathers wearing knitted sweaters.

We’d sat in a circle and talked about grandmothers and grandfathers. We went around the circle and everyone gave their name for their grandmother.

“Nanny.”

“Gran.”

“Bubbie.”

“Nonna.”

“Oma.”

When the teacher came to me, I didn’t have an answer. Everyone stared at me.

“You don’t know your grandmother’s name?” said Sharon.

I shook my head, enjoying the feel of my hair sliding over the back of my neck.

“I’ve never met my grandmother.”

“Neither of them?”

She was looking at me like I was weird. I knew, because people always looked at me like I was weird. Like on the first day of school when the teacher tried three times to say my name. She made me say it, and then she would repeat it asking me if it was right.

After a while I nodded even though it was wrong. She said it “Pay-yal,” so everyone called me that too. I asked Mom why she didn’t give me a normal name like Jennifer, and she told me Payal was a beautiful name. I didn’t believe her. No Jennifer had to say their name out loud in front of the whole class.

No Jennifer didn’t know the name of their grandmother.

But now she was coming, so I could answer the question right.

Mom was cooking a lot. Mom always cooked a lot, but after dinner she was still cooking. “Ammaji might be hungry when she gets here.”

“Is she bringing me a present?” Lots of kids in my class had grandmothers visit and bring presents, with more on Christmas and birthdays. Kids who saw their grandmothers every week for dinner didn’t get presents, so visiting grandmothers seemed better.

Mom cuffed me on top of my head.

“Ow!”

“Your Ammaji is coming all the way from India to see you, and all you ask about are presents?”

I’d gotten this wrong too. Wrong at home and wrong at school.

Mom let me stay up late to wait for Ammaji because it was a Friday and there was no school tomorrow, but I fell asleep anyway. I dreamed of my grandmother. She floated down on a puffy cloud, like the snow-white puff of hair curled around her head. She wore pink lipstick and a fuzzy pink sweater, and she smelled like chocolate chip cookies. “I love you, Sweet Pea,” she said, and handed me a big, red box with a silver bow. When I opened it, a puppy jumped out and licked my face.

Voices from downstairs woke me up. One was Mom’s. The other was sharp, and sounded like it was coming out of someone’s nose. They were speaking in Gujarati, so I didn’t understand.

I crept halfway down the stairs in my pink pyjamas and sat. Mom was in the kitchen with a woman in a white cotton sari. I’d never seen such a plain sari. Mom wore saris—shiny and bright coloured, covered in gold and silver threads—when we were dressing up in Indian clothes to go to parties, taking them from the high shelves in her closets. This one could have been bed sheets. Old bed sheets. I could see her from the back, her hair in a long, thin grey braid. I felt my own hair. It was tangled, and I’d never worn it in a braid. I couldn’t do it myself, and Mom said it took too long to do it for me. The woman was barefoot, and I could tell from the hand gestures that Mom was trying to convince her to sit down.

I edged down one more step, but Mom saw me. She waved me over. “Payal. Come.”

The woman in the white sari turned around. She was old and wrinkled and her face caved in at the cheeks. I shook my head. The woman said something sharply to Mom, and Mom repeated herself in a louder voice. I uncurled my legs and came down the steps one at a time.

“This is your Ammaji,” said Mom, leading me to her. “Pug elow. Touch her feet.”

I looked up at Mom. “I know what it means.”

“So do it,” she said, pushing me.

I bent down and touched the woman’s feet. They were dry and wrinkled, and her toenails were yellow. I stood up and folded my hands. Mom breathed out like she was relaxing, and Ammaji put a hand on my head and smoothed down my hair as she spoke in Gujarati.

“She’s saying you are very big,” said Mom. They spoke to each other for a moment, and then Ammaji looked at me and spoke. Her voice went up at the end, so I knew she was asking a question. She said it again slowly. She had a big diamond in her nose. Mom had a small diamond in hers too. I rubbed my nose—all skin, no stones.

Mom translated. “She wants to know when you will come to India.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what to say, so I looked at my feet. They were small compared to the brown kitchen tiles. My whole foot fit inside one tile.

They spoke a little more, and then Mom sat me down for breakfast. “Your Ammaji has brought laddoo from India for you.”

We had to go all the way to Gerrard Street for laddoo, deep orange balls of sweet. I never got to eat it for breakfast.

Ammaji brought a small cardboard box edged with purple diagonal stripes. She lifted the lid off, and a sweet spiced smell came out. Inside were small brown balls.

“Take one,” said Mom.

I looked up at her. “They’re supposed to be orange.”

“Those are orange laddoo. These are brown laddoo.”

Still, I didn’t take one. “What if I don’t like it?” I wasn’t allowed to not finish my food. Mom said if I didn’t finish my food, it was going in my hair. Whenever we were at an Indian party, all the aunties and uncles would say so too. They weren’t really my aunties and uncles, not like Sharon’s aunties and uncles, but that’s what I called them anyway. It was easier than remembering all their names.

Mom took one out of the box and put it on the plate in front of me. “Just try it. Ammaji made these for you.” Her voice was coming out louder and faster, and she was moving her eyes towards Ammaji.

I picked it up and looked at Ammaji, who was looking at me. She didn’t seem mad at all, not like Mom. Her eyes met mine steadily, and then she smiled. Still looking at her, I took a bite. It was sweet, but not as sweet as orange laddoo. It was cold but tasted warm like gur, and something in it was a little bit hot—taste hot, not temperature hot—but still not too hot like when Mom gives me Indian food full of big pieces of ginger. It was good. I chewed and took another bite, a big one this time. And then another, and it was gone. Mom sighed a little bit.

Ammaji smiled again and put another brown laddoo on my plate. She spoke softly to me in Gujarati, saying my name but nothing else I understood, and stroked my tangled hair.

All day Saturday I followed Ammaji like a shadow, but she stayed around the house, in the kitchen and in the living room. I showed her my room and all my toys and my favourite Barbie dolls. She helped me braid their long, blonde hair and tie the ends with bits of yarn. I didn’t mind that we had to eat Indian food for every meal, but I still asked Mom if we could have pizza instead; she got mad for a second, and then told me that I loved Indian food as she looked at Ammaji. I also loved pizza and maybe Ammaji would too.

Ammaji sang songs in Gujarati to me, and I didn’t understand them except for the words “Ek, Beh, Thron” which meant “One, Two, Three.” I taught her the same words in English, repeating them over and over again until she got it. Maybe if I repeated every word I knew with her enough, she would be able to talk to me.

I was allowed to stay up late but fell asleep leaning against Ammaji, the sandalwood smell of her white cotton saris in my nose. When Sunday night rolled around Mom said I had to sleep in my own bed.

I woke up early on Monday, and Mom helped me get dressed for school in my pink corduroy pants and pink-and-green sweater.

“Do I have to go to school?” I always asked. Mom never answered.

Ammaji asked questions which Mom translated for me. “She wants to know where your school uniform is. When we were little, we had to wear a uniform to school every day. And our hair had to be in two plaits.”

“Plaits?”

Mom searched for the word on the ceiling. “Braids.”

I was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, waiting for Mom to come and brush my hair before school. I was nervous because my hair was always tangled and Mom always pulled hard and I always cried and then Mom always yelled at me for crying. Ammaji was sitting on the floor cross-legged behind me. She said something to Mom who left and came back with a white jar with green letters on it. She gave it to Ammaji who opened it up and let me smell it. Coconut.

“Do you know what this is?” said Mom. I shook my head. “Coconut oil.”

“It doesn’t look like oil.”

“It’s for your hair. Your Ammaji puts coconut oil in her hair every night. And when we were little, she would massage it into our heads and plait our hair for school.”

Ammaji scraped a soft white lump out of the jar, and rubbed her hands together fast. She pulled them apart, and the white was gone and her hands were oily. She put them on my head and gently began to rub. Her hands felt soft and warm and strong; my head felt pillowed, like in that moment before you fall asleep, snuggled down under soft .

“It’s good for your hair,” said Mom. “Keeps your head cool and your hair soft.”

Ammaji ran her fingers through my hair without catching anything. No tangles! I put my hands through my own hair, feeling it slide against the webs between my fingers. I smelled the coconut on my fingers. Ammaji took the hairbrush and ran it through my hair. “It doesn’t hurt at all!”

“Thank God,” said Mom.

Ammaji parted my hair in the middle and pulled it into two braids, finishing them with elastic bands. I swung my head back and forth, feeling the two small ropes of hair hitting my shoulders.

Amit walked with me to school, Ammaji waving to us as we left. Once we got to the school yard, he ran off to join the big kids. They waved and shouted his name when he arrived, but nobody ever looked for me. I stayed by the edge of the playground until the bell rang. The other kids didn’t say anything about my braids when we lined up to go in, or when we first sat down at our desks; but as the day went on, they were looking at me and whispering.

Sharon told me why during recess. “Everyone wants to know why your hair is greasy. Don’t you wash it?”

“I wash my hair!” My eyes stung a little bit.

“But why is it dirty?”

“It’s not dirty. There’s coconut oil in it.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “Why would you put oil in your hair?”

My head was getting warm. “It’s something Indian people do.” She kept staring at me. “My grandmother did it.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You shouldn’t go around with dirty hair. You’ll get bugs. Then I won’t be allowed to play with you.” She walked away from me. I didn’t dare join the other girls in the playground.

All day, everyone looked at me. I couldn’t hide my head, and when Amit came to walk me home I ran ahead of him the whole way. Mom had barely opened the door before I screamed at her. “Why did you make me go to school with oil in my hair?”

She looked to Amit for explanations, but he had none. I cried and shouted, words coming out in pieces. Ammaji stepped forward and tried to grab hold of my hands, but I kept shouting. “I don’t like you! Let me go!”

Mom cuffed me on top of my head. “How can you say that? Respect your elders.”

I looked at Ammaji for help. She didn’t say or do anything except try to hold me, but I pulled away and ran upstairs to my room.

No one understood anything I said. I could hear them talking in Gujarati downstairs, and I couldn’t understand them either. Still crying, I picked up my Barbies and undid their braids. Their blonde hair fell loose and untangled, silkier and prettier than mine would ever be.

November 2017

by Angie Ellis

She notices everything—the dimples on his knuckles, a replaced button on his collared shirt, his blond lashes. He lifts his eyes to her briefly, then down to his bowl and back up again; his little fingers curl around the spoon and hold it for long moments before drawing it to his mouth.

She reaches across the table and places her hand on his. He flinches but leaves it there.

“Are you tired?” she asks.

“No.”

“Are you done eating?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like a bath?” She shouldn’t ask so many questions, or he’ll feel interrogated.

She stands and smooths her skirt then puts the kettle on, though she has no reason to. She fills the sink with hot, sudsy water for his one small bowl, small glass and spoon. Her hands are shaking, and she doesn’t want him to see.

“Your mother and daddy treating you alright?”

He twists back and forth in his chair, nodding his head. He’s restless.

“Well. No matter. I already know they treat you well; I’ve seen that room full of toys.” She looks back at him and smiles. He’s twisting faster now, as though trying to make his chair spin, his brown leather shoes hitting the leg of the table. She remembers these moments from childhood, when her own body was too small to contain the electricity that coursed through it. When adults talking sounded distant and dull, and she was ready to burst through her skin.

“Why don’t you go play.” Her intention was to offer understanding, but she fears the words came out of her mouth too quickly and sounded impatient.

He skitters off his chair and up the stairs. She looks at the empty steps, worn swayback from three generations of Sutherland feet travelling them. She feels water on her foot and realizes her wet rag is dripping.

Her parents come home after he’s asleep, and she’s too ashamed to admit that she sat at the kitchen table listening to him play until he grew quiet, then sneaked upstairs and watched him, snoring amongst his toy soldiers on the floor. When she carried him to bed he was heavier than she expected and smelled like warm earth and vegetable soup.

“How’d your brother do?” her father asks, always sure to reaffirm where things stand.

“Fine. Great. He had a snack. Played a bit.”

“Good, good.” He pulls his wallet from his back pocket and thumbs through the bills.

“No, Dad . . .”

“No, no. I insist.” He hands her money, and she sets it on the coffee table. “It was a real treat, your mother and I going out. We never get a chance anymore.”

“Honey, you look tired.” Her mother steps through her coming-home routine—brushing off and hanging up her coat, checking the pockets (always empty), setting her shoes with toes forward just under the coat, placing the car keys that her father tossed onto the hall table into the glass bowl on the hall table, checking her hair in the mirror, and then stepping into the living room. “You should go to bed, it’s an early bus tomorrow.”

“What time does he usually wake up?” She should have said goodnight, at the very least.

“Oh.” Her mother waves her hand through the air. “It won’t be until after you two have left. Isn’t that right, George?”

“Yep, bright and early.” Her father collapses into his wingback chair. The swag lamp casts a warm circle around him, as though he’s in a one-man play. “You packed?”

“Not yet.” She walks up the worn stairs, past his bedroom where she had put each tiny metal soldier back in the box, and into her old room, still pink. She has the strange thought of her little-girl room next to his little-boy room and wonders if they would have been friends if time had warped it in their favour, or mother and son if the world were different.

March 2018