Illustration by Jessica Dryden.

There was a knock on the door. Mum didn’t answer it. Maybe she didn’t hear it. I heard it. But I’m not allowed to do more than look through the screen.

I was only left alone twice or three times. One of those times someone knocked on the door and it was a big man. He asked, “Is your mother home?” and I said “no” and he asked, “Is your father home then, please?” and I said “no.” I remembered that I should not have said no but I couldn’t say yes so I fixed it by saying, “My big brother is home but he is busy.” But I don’t have a big brother. The man went away.

Later there was a knock on the door and I didn’t answer it in case it was the big man again. My mum didn’t go and see who was there because she didn’t hear it. I know because I waited on the stairs until the person went away. I went into the kitchen and asked, “Mum did you hear someone was knocking on the door?” and she said, “Oh? I didn’t hear it.” Then she went to look through the screen and no one was there.

My big sister asked me to tell her a story so she could sleep and I told her “once upon a time there was a knock on the door.” She said, “Ooh good beginning” and I kicked my feet together because I do that when things feel good. It was becoming morning and I tried to open her curtain to look for strangers but my sister said “dark.” I said, “It doesn’t smell like vodka this time,” because her favourite is vodka and tomato juice and she told me no it was whiskey and I should tell the story or get out of her room.

I said, “Once upon a time there was a knock on the door” and she said “good.” I said, “But nobody answered.” She said, “I don’t like that. I want to know who it is.” I was nervous she would kick me out but I still said, “No, no one answered it but I will tell you about the man who it was.” My sister closed her eyes and said, “Okay” and I pretended in my mind I was laying down a picnic blanket, because that’s what it feels like to start a story.

“Once upon a time there was a knock on the door, but nobody answered it. The man at the door was a big man. He had a cane but he didn’t need to use it. It was his dead grandpa’s and his grandpa was rich so the cane made him look rich, he thought. The cane had the face of a swan for a handle and red rubies for eyes.”

I was happy about the way the cane came out, because it sounded very nice. I have rubies in a ring for my birthstone, but they aren’t real.

“But the man leaned on the cane anyway so people would think he needed it at least a little.”

“It made him look dignified,” said my sister.

“Yes, dignified,” I said.

“What was the man’s name?” my sister asked but I told her she’s not allowed to know that yet and it’s my story. My cheeks got hot because really I couldn’t think of a name. I was still smoothing out the picnic blanket. She said “okay okay okay sorry” in my face and then I could tell I’d remember the whiskey smell for next time.

I said, “The man was the type who does bad things.”

My sister asked, “Like what?”

“Well, he had love in his heart for people but he would also maybe smash a bottle on their heads to get their money from their pockets.”

“Jesus,” my sister said.

“He would call the ambulance after, sometimes. He wasn’t a bad man.”

My sister’s stomach made a sound of trapped toots.

“He didn’t use the cane to smash their heads because he loved the cane a lot. He would never sell it or break it across something. He didn’t have a family any more but family was his utmost priority.”

I’ve heard my mum say that to my dad, “Family should be your utmost priority.” My sister made an ooh sound when I said it like making fun but also impressed.

“When the man knocked on the door of the house—it was a house like ours with people in it like ours—he wanted a lady to come to the door and for no men to be home. He knocks on a lot of doors hoping that.” “

But no one answered,” said my sister.

“No. There was a lady home but she didn’t hear the door because she was in the kitchen humming and staring at the oven door. But her kid heard the knock.”

“Is her kid you?”

“No, my age and stuff but different.”

“Okay.”

“Her kid hears the knock.”

“Can you get me some water?”

I was out of there fast. I love getting my sister water or whatever she asks for because she lets me stay longer when she feels in debt to me. My mother said to Mr. Carlson, “I am in your debt” and he said, “Then I’m a lucky man.” It was because he brought her a bottle of wine, and she told me you say that when someone does something nice for you and you feel like you should do something nice back, but you aren’t going to.

I was downstairs pouring water into a glass with a sailboat on it because it’s the glass that holds the most water. I did my trick which is: I put in three ice cubes and then stirred it with a knife really fast until the cubes were nearly melted so the water was cold. I made sure to hold the knife a very straight way where it wasn’t clinking too loudly against the sides of the glass. No one likes it when you make that much noise. Like forks on teeth, stomping when you walk.

When you put a knife only in water it’s still clean and so I put it back in the drawer.

My sister drank the water in one gulp, and some dripped down her cheek and was nearly at her neck before her sleeve got it. She made a loud sigh when the water was gone and looked happy and then upset.

“Oh my god I have a fucking ice cream headache,” she said and I told her to make the roof of her mouth warm with her tongue and then I waited for her to say okay keep going. She said: “Alright, keep going.”

“So no one hears?”

“The kid hears,” I said, and she said, “Oh yeah sorry the kid that’s you hears. You were saying the man.”

I didn’t tell her again it’s not me because I didn’t know who the kid was yet.

“I was saying the man. He wanted to come into our house, into the house I mean. So he knocked. The kid heard.”

“Whose head did he bash in?”

“That was the other time.”

“With a beer bottle.”

“Not beer. Other bottles. A bunch of guys who were coming from the bank.”

“Okay.”

She was not going to be awake after the next thing I said. I would have to make it a really good thing for her to stay awake. I remembered what I had practiced that day and I said my sister’s name and she opened her eyes and really slow I blew a big bubble with just my spit. She closed her eyes again before the spit popped.

“Maybe the kid does answer the door.” I could feel the room changing like when I listened to a recording of a heartbeat and suddenly everything became heartbeats. My sister’s eyes were closed and my feet were kicking together.

“Once upon a time there was a knock on the door. The mother was in the kitchen but the kid heard. The kid went to the window and looked through the screen, and – what did the kid see?”

My sister was breathing bigger from her belly.

“The big man,” my sister said.

“The kid saw the big man. He was even bigger now. If there was sun behind him there wouldn’t be sun anymore.” “

Big,” said my sister.

“Big,” I said and I was feeling good. “In the shadow of the man the kid saw the rubies in the eyes of the swan and wanted to touch them. The man knocked again.”

“Answer the goddamn door.” My sister turned onto her side.

“The kid pulled the door open and the man filled it up. The man asked, ‘Is your mother home?’ and the kid said ‘yes’. He asked, ‘Is your father home?’ and the kid said ‘no’ and the man said ‘good’. ‘Let’s go and see your mother,’ the man said. The kid said, ‘Yes, I think you two will get along,’ and they went into the kitchen. The mother was humming but she stopped when she saw the big man. She asked him did he want some tea. He said, ‘Chardonnay, two glasses.’”

Her sideways mouth was smiling. That’s a joke my mum makes.

“The mother felt like the man had love in his heart and she was right. She made the kid some tea and got the bottle and two glasses. They all sat. They were very happy together.

“The kid’s dad came home from the bank. He had too many bills stuffed in his pockets. He walked in the door and he said to the kid to do the trick with ice cubes to make cold water, but also not to clang the knife. Then he saw the big man sitting at the table emptying the bottle into the glasses. He put up one hand towards the ceiling, meaning, what kind of a man are you that you are drinking my wife’s joke with her? He put his other hand up too, and moved it quickly, and bills were falling out of his pockets. But he didn’t go any closer to the man.

“The big man stood up and smiled at the father. He took the bottle from the table and gave it to the kid. He lifted the kid gently up on a chair, and the kid smashed the bottle on the father’s head.”

My sister was asleep. She drooled and her top lip was like a baby thumb. My father was lying on the floor and then he was gone. The man was standing but in the house the shadow wasn’t so bad as when he was standing in the sun. Mum said, “I’m glad you didn’t use your cane, it would be a pity to break it.” The big man said to her, “Oh yes, it is very special to me.” The big man held up the cane and said to me, “Some day, this will be yours. Thank you for letting me in.” He let me stroke the swan’s face and touch the ruby eyes.

After Shanghai, I caught a cheap flight to Bangkok. In the sky, I met a group of Australians who joked about North Korea and Kim Jong-il the whole time and who said “g’day mate” for my pleasure. We parted ways at the airport then I travelled to Ko Phangan, where I think I was roofied at the Full Moon Party. Good strangers took pity on me, and one of them reminded me of Kimia. This is what the group of girls told me later at breakfast, on the beach, pretty girls, sticky already with the nine am humidity. I saw now that the girl sitting across our small, square table looked nothing like my little sister. But when she smiled so gracious-like and thoughtfully, that was when I noticed it.

“You gave me tons of life advice,” she said, with that innocent, fearless tone only nineteen year olds have. “We’re from Vancouver by the way,” she added. “You’re Canadian too, right? You said washroom yesterday instead of bathroom.” Her voice had that bright, elastic West Coast warmth.

“From Toronto,” I said.

“You also said that all that putting my career first was extremist feminist bullshit.”

They were like words rising from a grave that hadn’t been dug for me yet.

“I said what?”

“And you said, strangers are only scary if you’re someone to fear. You said that like, um, what did she say again?”

She’d turned to the others, who were blank and beautiful and worthy of love—I thought, why did I ever leave my city? These people exist where I’m from too.

“She said that, like, people are only scared of other people if they’re, like, fixating on some evil part of themselves.”

“I did?”

“You’re wise as fuck,” the third one said. The fourth one stayed silent in my presence, and the other girls made fun of her for it. She didn’t care. She’d keep staring at me only with these black eyes.

“My sister, by the way,” I finally told them. “The one you reminded me of, Kimia. That was her name. She’s dead.” I needed to see their faces when I said it. I needed it the way I need to be fucked by strangers. But why?—I thought of him, and how his ears must have burned.

“Oh my God.”

“I am so sorry.”

“We’re so sorry.”

“Oh my God, so sorry,” they said.

They were young, and so sweet. They travelled with their parents’ money and had bodies that bended with confidence in strange lands, that spoke of such perfect, disgraceful privilege—and yet their smiles were not to be mistaken for empathy.

“I’m kidding,” I said. I couldn’t cling to the truth. I didn’t want to. “My sister almost died. But she’s alive,” I said. I lied. But the key to lying is to latch onto that idea as if it were the only fact in this world worth knowing.

I stayed with them a while longer. I learned that all four of them were trained Yoga instructors. They were travelling to India next, for further certification, but had decided to stop first in Thailand.

“The food is amazing here. Have you tried the stir-fried noodles?” they asked.

Which was when I thought of that famous novel turned movie, about eating and travelling, which was when I thought of how food had not been a concern of mine not once on this trip, and then I thought of the last supper that I had enjoyed.

My whole life, I told them, after a few more beers, my whole life, has been a giant sacrifice.

“For who?” one or all of them had asked.

“To who, you mean.”

“To whom.”

“To whom?”

“To life.”

They laughed. I laughed too, but by then my soul felt like wine. Like I had turned water to wine, and that’s the opposite of it all, isn’t it? Why did he do that? Why did I know a story that did not even belong to my people, and cling to it more than I did my own? Why would you turn water to wine, Jesus?

***

In the café, he sits. He stares. But I am still in Europe. In Asia. The images of countries I never visited stream past my eyes.

***

While in Thailand, I had very little money. Those four lanky, creature-girls who lounged on the beach like sirens, and whose beautiful white arms and names, amid the anonymity of everyone, surfaced, slowly, like individual badges by which I could tell them apart; they told me I was wise. I told them they were beautiful and light and airy. I watched them in the morning, walk from their tiny, rented bungalow to worship a sun-god, positioning their bodies into perfect statues. One position was called Child’s Pose, where they prostrated, and their arms like wings lifted then fell snugly to their sides. I was reminded of my father. Once, I had seen him prostrate, pray to Allah, but religion was a barred phenomenon in my household —though my mother wore Allah on a gold necklace around her neck and though my eldest sister, in high school, picked up the expressions, Allaaaaaah and Say Walahi—and so with my father, I never spoke of religion. But I watched these girls, and it was no different, how they moved their bodies for meaning. I’d looked down then at my cup of instant coffee, and seen my arm covered in ugly, long, black hairs, made wispy now from so many years of waxing but still there.

“They don’t turn paler in the sun? I thought everyone’s hair turned paler in the sun,” one of them had said, with thin, turned down lips and judgement that was only accident.

In the afternoon, we watched the waves and talked about tsunamis.

“The end of the world is coming. That’s what I think,” one of them said.

“I think.” My voice had aged. It sounded broken to me. Their four, young bodies around our little, wooden patio table, leaned in closer to me, and I tried so hard not to envy them, or hate them because they were nice, they were so nice to me.

“What?”

“Yeah, what?”

“This obsession with the end of the world. It’s not the end, end. Sometimes I think we’re so afraid of the Earth continuing on without us that we have to believe we’ll see it all go down with us.” It was a thought I had never thought until that moment with the sun above us, and our waiter, small and tan with big teeth, delivering our stir-fried noodles and chopsticks.

“You know, I always thought maybe that’s why insects scare us so much yet we’re like, so big. Like, they always survive. No matter what. And we won’t.” The quiet one with dark eyes spoke. She ashed her cigarette into the ashtray between us with one leg folded against her chest.

“They’re more evolved than us, for sure.”

“Right. I guess. In a way.”

“They know how to survive.”

A gust of wind blew through us, tipping their empty plastic water glasses. Mine was filled with water, still, and stayed put.

“Survival of the fittest,” another one of them said.

I watched the cups fly off the table and be pushed farther out onto the beach, where a group of young men walked in flip-flops and bathing suits, laughing at the sudden surge of sand that had got into their eyes and mouths. The girls watched them walk, and the boys noticed them too. They smiled at each other, and it calmed me. The guys walked up the steps into the restaurant to speak with us. And I, the only dark head among the fair, knew my role as the exotic one to taste.

***

I followed the Yogis a while longer. “For fun,” I followed them along the narrow streets where the Thai prostitutes sit and blink and hope for johns they don’t want to fuck and I thought, I am not like them, and again, and again, nearly every feverish night, they led me dancing with them. Again, the girls, sirens with long hair, their transformation by then for me was complete and they danced on borrowed legs, they belonged someplace deep down below the water, where they could breathe.

But it was comfortable and familiar to be surrounded by women instead of men.

“I was raped once,” one of them revealed to me one night. I told her I was so sorry. “I’m not,” she said. She smiled, so brightly, and let her hair hang loose. “We all were. That’s how I got into Yoga. That’s how I met all these girls. A support group, sort of.”

But then the shadow of the man came to us one night. We slept on hammocks inside of mosquito nets in a makeshift cabin on the beach in a different town. The girls had gotten drunk on the beach with another group of tourists, waving their oh my Gods like boobs at Mardi Gras.

“Teach us how you do it. I feel like everyone here wants to fuck you,” they’d begged me, sipping on warm beer, giggling and bubbling the way nice girls are taught to.

“Just don’t give a fuck. Just.” And when people start to view you as wise, you start to believe you are. “Just feel the weight of you until that becomes your power.”

Then in the ocean-loud, pulsing heat of two am, the shadow was slipping into one of their beds—the one whose body she claimed had been filled with water at birth instead of bone, the one who had reminded me of my sister that first night these raped women had saved me from a mayberape, and she was laughing. “What are you doing? How did you find me here?” She laughed again.

“Shhhh,” he said. “Shhh.”

I listened to them. She was quiet. He was entirely silent and I wanted to tell her never, ever trust a man who makes no sounds in bed. And I wanted to know if she was okay. But I was afraid. I think back to that night where maybe I could been made a hero—I felt that I should have stopped it. She never fought him. I never heard a no. I never heard a condom wrapper tearing. I heard only the bones of a knee crack, the sandy floorboard as he lifted his body into the cot – the darkness that was absolute. And the breathing I heard was my own. And I thought of the sister I was never kind to. I was never kind to her, as a little girl, or teenager. And I didn’t know, had she died a virgin? Had she ever done a thing she didn’t want to do? And I hadn’t known her favourite colour when she died. She was so decisive and yet so changeable. Did she regret it, her last favourite, in her last second?

“Hello?”

The voice was not hers. She was lost, in some other ethereal land, dark yet orange, she was blind.

It was him. The voice of my shadow-man. I tumbled out of bed and ran, I ran foot against floorboard to the wet, cool sand. Water rushed over my legs, and groups of tourists still partied farther off on in the distance. And is there any place so infinite as a dark black sky over dark black water? I saw fire in the distance, where the people danced a dance that was an omen and a sadness. My nightgown, wet, billowed around me. I was waist-deep now. I shot my neck backwards and looked straight up at all the stars, and it was the closest to outer space I’ll ever feel, the closest to God I ever got, the loneliest, the most insignificant I have ever felt. And I wondered if this is what she wished to touch on too early, too curious for her own good, my sister.

“Are you okay?” The man shouted from the edge of the beach. And to find solace in a man, I thought, like my mother, my older sister, my friends, is the worst cowardice of all.

“Kora! Did you have a nightmare! Come back!” One of the girls called out. She was made shadow next to him.

I started to laugh.

“You’re supposed to sing me into the ocean not out of it, mermaids,” I shouted. I was laughing or crying. But the waves carried the words away into dark. I swam sideways, hair matted against my head towards the party that when I reached it was just smoke and a few voices speaking intensely in French. They stared up at me the way raccoons do at dawn.

I imagined making love to the shadow-man, him folding me like a sheet of clean, white paper, having a baby. I wanted to call A— and ask her why I kept fantasizing for things I did not want.

“Because you do want them,” she’d have said.

But she’s wrong.

***

In the morning, the one whose mouth slanted downwards talked about how much bigger her boobs had gotten since she was in high school. Another complained of a sunburn. All of them begged me to come.

“You can be a Master, too,” they sang.

***

What I never would have revealed to them was how much I did not want them to leave me. The following morning, the sky was the color of jaundiced skin, and one after the other, their warm lips kissed my tired cheek while we watched the Pacific Ocean crash against our dirty feet.

“Did you know?” the darkest-eyed one said, “did you know that apparently in the Odyssey by Homer, that whole time that Odysseus travels the seven seas, or whatever, there’s no mention of blue. It’s always grey.”

“Yeah. Blue wasn’t invented yet.”

“Are you stupid?” They laughed like bits of light falling from the sky. “Not invented! That doesn’t make any sense. You mean, we hadn’t like, developed the idea of it yet so then we couldn’t perceive it.”

“Same thing. That’s what I meant.”

A long pause and a momentary sliver of sun escaped behind a cloud.

“Do you think the world looked like it does today every day then, to them? I mean like, how much power do words really give a thing?”

They turned to me for wisdom but I was only twenty-nine. Their bodies crowded me.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wouldn’t cry.

“We’ll miss you,” they whispered. The one who looked and breathed like Kimia slipped a paper into my jeans pocket. Another said, “I did it last night. I did it and it was magical.”

How close to the edge is the magic of life? But the time for wisdom was finished. Instead, to each of them, like a slow, unsteady cat stretching awake, “Be careful,” I said, and thought of my mother. “Byeeeeeeee,” their voices pierced the humid air between us as they packed into a cab and left for the airport.

I phoned my parents. This was the first time since England I had spoken to them. My mother cried. My mother called me flower in a language I hadn’t heard spoken since March. Then my father came on.

“Are you happy?” he asked. I remember so distinctly because I couldn’t remember him ever asking me before.

“Since when do you care?” He said nothing. I tried again. I said, “I mean.”

“You think this is cool? What you’re doing? I know what you’re doing,” he said.

“What am I doing?”

He did that Iranian thing with his mouth to express shock and disappointment… something about the tongue against the roof of the mouth. So much shame in one sound. I felt small and full of rage.

“What am I doing? Tell me. What am I doing?”

You know.

You know, you know.

Exposed against this anemone August
is a way of unlearning the untaken graft
of leeching questions, a mischief starved in whys.

Why-because too much is the way
of knowing the chrysalis before
it crumples in the sun.

Mud-formed mirror of this sea-formed
rotunda reminds too much
of this face and will, like my mother’s

elusive redraft—pitch blood-knot
terra-form in the spilling
odd generations’ menses—

that must have started some sweet day we can only feign to rescue
from the old Carib cleanse
by test tube and accelerants,
rogue in empire’s wildfire ditched in our bays.

These are the many ways of love, saintly postures learned
in the books dye of our vogue distrusts, fighting the combustive, Antillean understanding of why,

the still-revolt of our bones’ sacred tow—inheritance, unmixable light
considered in the hummingbird’s mapless hum,
scattering this day, only just up, deep into the ground.

Why, even with twelve litany of litanies or reasons to stop
would they choose you
and sell you
and stamp you
and keep you—brief
and name you
and slit you down to kin
and name you
and call you
and breed you, bar you
and breed you, room you and jail you, jail you and cage you, cage you and cage you

Illustration by Erin Taniguchi.

A life-hack I read on the internet told me to avoid landlords who are late for the first meeting. If I had followed the life-hack, I wouldn’t be living where I live now, which is in the sewer. So that’s another lesson I had to learn the hard way.

I was waiting for a potential landlord who listed a decent basement bachelor on Kijiji. It was 2:23 pm and our meeting was for 2:15 pm. I thought I’d give the potential landlord the benefit of the doubt. I thought the best course of action would be to text the landlord with something like, “Hey, I’m here to look at the apartment when can I expect you?” A little nudge, you know? I didn’t even get the chance to send that text because right as I was considering sending it I got a text that said, “Look at your feet.” I looked at my feet. What I saw was a black spider the size of a quarter hopping on the keyboard of an iPhone 4S. Typing. I saw it type the words, “Don’t freak out: I’m the landlord.” Then I got another text from the same number. The text said, “Don’t freak out: I’m the landlord.” I put two and two together.

“You’re the landlord?” I asked.

“Yes,” the spider said.

I was afraid of spiders.

“Are you afraid of spiders?” my spider landlord asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Great. Then everything is fine. My name is Selby, by the way. Let’s go take a look at the place.”

I followed Selby to the basement entrance, which was at the side of the building. She told me to follow her and then she scuttled through the gap between the door and the floor. I opted for the more traditional open-door-and-walk-through-it method.

The apartment was only one room; it had only one window, a hot plate instead of a stovetop, and a bar fridge instead of a full fridge—but it wasn’t gross and it was in my price range. Actually it was kinda gross and a little bit out of my price range. I told Selby I’d take it.

The first few days were great. But things stopped being so great when my girlfriend Dakota came over to visit for the first time. I was excited have her over to the new place, but I didn’t want to admit right at the outset that my landlord was a spider. I figured she might not like that. I didn’t think it was a big problem—I just thought the situation was abnormal and so it might be better to ease into. I wanted to wait a little bit, wait until she said, “The apartment is perfect!” before I said, “Yeah, there’s just one thing and it’s totally cool but my landlord is a spider.”

Anyway, it didn’t work out like that. When Dakota arrived she had to pee, so she went straight into the washroom and then I heard a scream and then a thud and I figured she had just killed Selby. I burst into the washroom.

“A little privacy!” Dakota said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “But I heard a scream.”

“Just a spider. Don’t worry, I got it.”

“What do you mean got it?”

“I squished it with my shoe.”

“Where’s it now?”

“I picked it up with some toilet paper and threw it in the bowl.”

“You’re peeing on it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s desecrating a corpse!”

Dakota gave me weird look.

“I didn’t want to flush twice,” she explained. “I hate the sound of flushing. Floosh flanananana gaga gaga GLUNK aaaahhhh,” she said, impersonating a toilet, shuddering at the end. “I hate that sound. They should make silent toilets, I’d buy one.”

“There’s something urgent I need to tell you,” I said.

I explained to her the whole deal: spider landlord, etc. She was freaked out at first, but calmed down quickly. I fished the spider out of the toilet, sprawled its lifeless body on the white tile floor and took a good look to see if I could recognize the body as Selby’s. Inconclusive.

“So how’d your landlord get transformed into a spider? Was it a curse?”

“She’s always been a spider,” I said. “I think so, at least. Either way, you shouldn’t assume those who are different than you have been cursed.”

“Whatever. Is this her?”

I got out a magnifying glass for a second look, but all I saw was the same thing but bigger.

“Inconclusive,” I said.

I thought I’d bring the question right to the source: Selby my spider landlord. I didn’t want to text her “are you dead?” though, because that would just introduce more questions on her end. Instead, I did the classic fake-text-to-the-wrong-number trick.

“Hey Rodney,” my text to Selby began, “you still up for a movie tonight?”

“Wrong number,” Selby texted back. “This is Selby, your landlord.”

Not dead!

“That settles it,” said Dakota. “Now, let’s watch a movie or something.”

“What? No, we still have to deal with this,” I said, pointing at the dead spider lying between us on the floor.

“We did deal with it,” said Dakota, pointing at the text message.

“But what if it’s her daughter or something?”

“Spiders die all the time,” said Dakota. “Flush it and move on. I heard Inside Out is on Netflix now. We should watch Inside Out. On Netflix.”

I stared at her. “You don’t mean that, do you?”

“Yeah, Sloane told me it’s great. She said she watched the other day and bawled her eyes out.”

“I mean about not further investigating the identity of this spider.”

“Oh, yeah, I don’t care about that. Time for the ol’ Floosh flanananana gaga gaga GLUNK aaaahhhh.”

“That’s what you do with pee and poo, not individuals,” I replied, attempting to sound harsh.

I bent down and picked up the spider, put it on a piece of white paper, placed an inverted glass on top of it, and then lifted the whole thing to my kitchen table. Dakota said I was being overzealous. I told Dakota she needed more empathy. She told me I needed to be practical. I called her a murderer, which is not something you should say to someone you love unless you really, really mean it. We had a big fight. She said I was worthless, that my apartment was a dump, that my life was a dump, and that she wished she had squished and killed me instead of the spider. After that she stomped out of my apartment and whole life.

I felt a wave of depression hit me like that time I was at the wave pool as a kid and was sad about it. This was supposed to be a romantic night with my girlfriend in my new apartment and now it was ruined. I considered chasing after Dakota, apologizing to her and telling her that I loved her. But in that moment, I realized I didn’t love her. She killed a spider and didn’t care about it. She also didn’t care that I cared about it. And with all the things she said about me and my lifestyle, it sounded like she didn’t care about me either. I was hurt. I wanted to wallow, but I had some loose ends to tie up: I still had to find out who this dead spider on my kitchen table was. I texted my landlord, “There’s been an accident.”

Selby came over immediately. She walked right in, underneath the door. I thought that was kinda rude, but it may have been easier for her than knocking. I pointed her to the upside-down glass on my kitchen table, a museum exhibit of a dead spider. I took the glass away so Selby could have a better look.

“That’s my cousin. Her name was Louise. She was a good spider,” Selby said.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s a tragedy, a real tragedy.” Selby began to wrap Louise in webbing. “I’m really going to miss her,” Selby continued sombrely, as she began to eat her cousin. “Yum,” she said, after she’d gulped the whole thing down.

“Did you just eat your cousin?” I asked.

“It’s what we do.”

“But aren’t you sad or anything?”

Selby rolled all eight of her eyes.

“Spiders die all the time,” she said. “If I spent my time feeling sad for all my family members who get squished, dismembered by sociopathic children, or swallowed by sleeping adults I’d never get anything done.”

“I thought that swallowing in sleep thing was a myth.”

“Tell that to my parents.”

“Oh.”

“Was that all then? Are there any lightbulbs for me to switch for you? Any leaky faucets?”

“No, that’s it,” I said.

“Well, thanks for dinner,” said Selby. And then she scuttled away, back to her apartment in the floorboards between the second and third floors.

So there I was, alone again. It turns out Dakota was right: it wasn’t a big deal that she squished the spider. The big deal was how I reacted to it. Dakota didn’t want to dwell on the incident—all she wanted was for me to spend time with her, and I exaggerated a minor incident into a relationship-ending one. Our relationship had been flushed down the toilet, and now I had to move on. But that wasn’t enough. I was upset at Dakota because she didn’t respect my life, but the truth was that I didn’t have anything worthy of respect. If I really was going to learn and grow from this experience, I had to start things new. I stepped into the toilet and crammed my feet into the hole for balance.

And I flushed myself down.

Illustration by Jason Skinner

Say Uncle

The uncles had basement rec rooms with pool tables or plaid couches. The uncles had histories in the military that you had no idea about. The uncles distilled their own alcohol in giant jugs, which they showed off to your parents proudly. The uncles wore wide-collared shirts and flannel pants. The uncles talked cars. The uncles held slideshows. The uncles insisted on paying. The uncles toured you around, pointing out the car window and giving you historical facts about their cities. The uncles mocked their own children who, even when they became defiant, said only, “Daaaad!”

The uncles called you over to them and said, “See if you can figure this out,” always presenting you something as if it was a riddle or a challenge, and you worried from that single phrase onward that you would fail before them. The uncles were men who trimmed their nose hairs, men who carried pocket knives, stubborn men who would ask nothing of anyone, men who ate and drank too much at Christmas, men with neighbors they told stories about as if they were enemies, men with large umbrellas, men with tackle boxes, men who knew the best route and the best way to remove a loose tooth, men who argued about politics into the night until you closed your eyes and the darkness replaced their voices with the gargle of rain.

As you grew older, the uncles said sexist things, or racist things. They seemed more stubborn than before. They said things to your mother you didn’t think funny. They tried to kid with you but only turned your face purple. They liked hack writers you had never thought they would like. Their waistlines grew, and they overcame cancers and operations and heart conditions and car accidents and mishaps that you were informed of as factually as possible. “Tell me about my uncle,” you said, but the answers were always brief and uncertain.

Eventually you would be at some family party and you could see them fading out, like ghosts, growing sallow right before your eyes, melting in the rain as if they were made of chalk. “I’ll never see you again,” you thought. “The next time we all get together, one of you won’t be here,” and it was true, but it was never the one you would have figured.

The uncles were dying. Slowly, softly, they were forgetting things, and falling away into graves that were damp with rain, and you had no poetry for them, though you wished you did, no real knowledge of who they were. There was only the absence of walking down a foreign laneway in a cemetery far from your own home and wondering how long until the next cup of hot coffee and if it was wrong to bend to wipe the mud from your shoes.

But the uncles weren’t over. They were still cracking jokes. When you closed your eyes, you still saw them. The uncle with the red shirt. The uncle with the shirt as yellow-gold as his tooth. The uncle in the bow-tie at the wedding. The uncle whose hair grew straight upward, and the uncle who had no hair, and the uncle with the beard growing half down his neck, and the uncle who lost a hand a long time ago, and the uncle with the big metal belt buckle, and the intellectual uncle in Hush Puppies, and the uncle who drove like your father, slow and staring straight ahead.

There is the uncle still singing carols behind your right ear in deep baritone. There is the uncle more silent than the rest, whose voice is the color of smoke, and whose fingers are the color of smoke, and whose eyes are the color of smoke. There is the uncle whose lap you sat on, though you have no recollection of it, have only a photo of yourself there, perched, telling a secret story to him when you were so small his hand was a country. A toy you don’t remember resting on his knee as if you had set up a camp.

No, the uncles weren’t over. The uncles were still crisp, and still smelled of peppermint and tobacco, and apples and wool, and new leather, and the very old pages of very old books. Even now when you fall into sleep, they are waiting, their voices steady in another room, just there on the other side of the wall where everything is in black and white.

They are caulking windows and killing bees. They are hauling old artifacts out of a barn and saying, “You think that’s worth something?” and setting it out to the curb. They are sawing the branches off a dead tree and stacking them in piles. They are launching a boat into the water—just there, just behind the wall, in that room, a whole boat. They are caught on video and they are laughing. They are younger than you remember, those men you know and never know. They are all together, the uncles from your mother’s side and the uncles from your father’s side, and the great uncles on both sides. They are looking up at the sky for rain, and saying, “Do you think she’ll hold?”

So when your father walks into that room and takes his place among them, wearing a white cap he favors for golf days, you can’t help but startle. He’s not your uncle, but he is an uncle. He cups his hand against the wind and lights a cigarette, lips pulling at the paper. He lifts his eyes to the sky they are still appraising, which looks something like your grandparents’ ceiling and something like the blue stratocumulus over Lake Michigan, and says, “I think it will.”

The uncles turn to him and nod.

Illustration by Drew Shannon

Lee Marvin, at your service

There was a time, and it feels like yesterday, but really it was an era of Cold War paranoia and black dial phones and colour-TV-as-novelty, when it seemed like everywhere you went, every corner you turned, Lee Marvin was there, ready to give you a hand.

You would flood the engine of your car, and you’d sit there in your driveway, still pumping away at the pedal, and a song by Paul Revere and the Raiders would be squeaking out of your tinny radio speaker, and there’d be a knock at your window. You’d crank the window down, that’s how you did it in those days, you’d crank your window down and peer up into the sunlight, and a tall figure would blot out the sun like there was some goddamn eclipse or something. And before you could say, “Are you Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian,” the giant silhouette with a brush cut would say, “Lee Marvin, at your service.” And within minutes, seriously, you’d be picking up your date and you’d both go five-pin bowling.

Maybe your father would die, or no, your grandmother who lived in the family room and didn’t know any English, only spoke Russian, but she made a great snack by frying up chicken fat and onions, and the whole family would sit in front of the Marvelous Invention of Colour TV and watch Laugh-In while dipping into the greasy bowl Grandma had prepared. And now she was gone, and you’ve all just come home from the funeral, and Solly says, “We’d better cover all the windows,” and Sarah says, “No, we have to take the pillows off the bed and paint Jewish stars on all the mirrors,” and Dad says, “Everyone take off your shoes and put on slippers or flip-flops.” But really, no one had ever paid attention before to what you had to do when you were sitting shiva, because it had only ever been other people’s shivas. And then there was a knock at the door, and when Mom answered, a tall blond man with muscular front teeth would thrust his head inside and say, “Lee Marvin, at your service.” And before you knew it, you’d have all the Jewish mourning customs down pat, and Lee would be leading the minyan in the Kaddish.

Same with if you were in a bank and lining up for the teller and you were confused by how to fill out the deposit slip, or if some skinny thug was robbing the bank, or if two kids in striped shirts were yelling at each other in the schoolyard, or if you were short a few pennies when you were buying a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of cream soda, or if you had trouble making one of those cardboard pinhole viewers when there was a solar eclipse — next thing you knew, before you had even begun to panic: “Lee Marvin, at your service.” That familiar square-jawed grin, the big hand reaching out to shake your own more mortal hand — “Lee Marvin, at your service” — and then he’d do his thing, it would only take a second, and everything would be better and you’d be on your way and the grilled-cheese sandwich wouldn’t even have gotten cold yet, if there was a grilled-cheese sandwich involved in the situation.

But it’s not like Lee Marvin didn’t have his own problems. Lee Marvin had plenty. Just ask Jane Fonda, or Jean Seberg, or John Cassavetes. Or, if you don’t like people whose names begin with the same letter as Jesus, ask Angie Dickinson. Anyway, this all happened so long ago, it’s like it was another lifetime. I’ve put on weight, my hair is white now, and when I get my picture taken, it always looks like I’m lying in a coffin, like when Polly, our Ukrainian cleaning woman, showed us a photograph of her husband back in the Ukraine, and he really was lying in a coffin. We caught Polly stealing some of Mom’s jewellery, and that was the end of Polly in our home. She wasn’t very good anyway — sometimes we’d find cobwebs up near the ceiling after she left.

Our next cleaning woman was Clara, and Clara was from Argentina, and she never stole anything, not even if we deliberately left something out to test her. That’s the difference between Ukrainians and Argentinians. Also, when Clara found my Playboy collection hidden under my bed, she didn’t tell my parents. She just put the magazines in order by year and month and straightened out the stack. Bruce Jay Friedman, who is a very good writer — I’ve read four of his novels — used to always write for Playboy. I always noticed his name at the top of his articles — it was such a Jewish name. It surprised me to see people with Jewish names writing in a magazine with nudie girls. My favourite Playmate was a lady from Hoboken, New Jersey. I think she’s selling real estate now.

The thing about selling real estate is you have to really love what you’re doing, because it’s only genuine enthusiasm that is going to compel someone to fork out the kind of money necessary to own their own house. And you have to be able to look at the bright side of things — you have to always find the rainbow in the goddamn bug-infested swamp. If you lose your excitement about selling real estate — like, if you were really good once but now there’s no challenge left — it’s time to do something. People who don’t think positively can’t be in the real estate business. Sure, they might be able to sell a ramshackle bungalow here and there, but they could never be really successful. They should go into a business they can be more passionate about, like owning a hardware store or testing makeup products on animals.

The best Bruce Jay Friedman novel, according to me, is Stern. The former Playmate from Hoboken, New Jersey, is Janet Lupo.

May I suggest that you schedule an appointment with a career counsellor? These are people who come in all shapes and sizes, and they can make a genuine difference in your life. They may not be able to guarantee you a job, but they can help steer you towards the kind of professional pursuit that you are qualified for, and that you would find meaningful. Something you can really get behind.

Some think that a meaningful job is one that affects a lot of people, such as coming up with an important and complex theory like Einstein did, or being a prime minister, or becoming a police officer in a bad neighbourhood who really connects with the young people and encourages them to get meaningful jobs instead of being hoodlums and layabouts. A meaningful job might only be meaningful to the person who has the job, but that is enough. Meaningfulness is not measured by quantity. Being a meaningful job means being meaningful to the person who holds the job: it gives them self-respect and a purpose in life. It might just be playing a particular chord on a pipe organ once a year on the same date. It might be laying pipe for the delivery of oil. It might be sitting on a porch in a pioneer village smoking a corncob pipe like you were from the 1840s.

Early in 1840, the first issue of the American magazine Electro-Magnetic Intelligencer was published. It appeared on January 18. On the same date, but in 1961, the lie detector was first employed in the Netherlands. Another interesting fact about the Netherlands is that one in three Dutch people belong to a sports club, plus approximately 300 castles in Holland are open to the public. These are “fun facts.” You will find many more “fun facts” sprinkled about in other stories that I have written.

By Ariefrahman (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Squirrel

A crow descends on
Queen’s Park Circle at rush hour.
He tries to pluck
the stubborn stringy liver from a squirrel.
Previously the squirrel
had direly underestimated the pep of a Honda Civic.
Prior to that there had been enthusiastic dining
all around the lunch fry truck and garbage.
The crow pierces the liver with his beak and tugs,
then starts to play
like someone’s strung up the mop at the jugband jamboree,
swinging, deft, on one leg.
The squirrel is no Prometheus to the crow’s idolatry.
It’s not like that.

Photo by Gaye Jackson

What the Belgian Wrote

It was the last Sunday of the month, so Kalman was throwing a bottle into the ocean. Sometimes on calm days the club rented canoes and paddled out from the shore to maximize their chances. That was what Martin, the club president, said. But Kalman wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. The chance of what, and increased how much? And what were their chances on days too cold to rent the canoes?

The Bottlenecks were Martin’s idea, so he called the shots. The rules weren’t many. You couldn’t miss the meetings, which was fine with Kalman. You had to bring a bottle every time. Whatever else, you had to write your address and telephone number inside the bottle. That was about it. You didn’t have to say what else you’d written, if anything.

Sometimes Kalman couldn’t think of anything to write, so he would fold the paper an extra time and push it inside with only his basic information. Capping the bottle, he would dip it into the wax he melted for sealing. When he first joined, Kalman melted the wax in whatever vessel was handy, then spent an hour scrubbing it clean. Now that he was an old hand, he had a small bowl set aside for melting the wax. He didn’t bother cleaning it. When the wax ran low, he chopped up dollar store candles with a bread knife and threw them in the bowl. He melted the wax in his microwave oven, which his ex-wife hadn’t bothered to take with her.

After joining the club, Kalman found himself noticing bottles more. He noticed them in women’s hands, or parting their lips; he noticed them broken on the ground.

The point of the club was to have someone else find your bottle. There were other clubs in other countries doing the same thing all the time. So far five bottles had been found by club members around the world. One of the club people who found a bottle was a young girl with a lazy eye in Kent. She wrote to the man who had thrown the bottle, who lived in Belgium. When he found out she had not only discovered his bottle, but that she too threw a bottle in the ocean once a month, the Belgian came over to meet her. A short while later they were married. Martin told Kalman and the rest of the club this story almost every month.

Walking home from the August meeting, Kalman was squinting into the sun. His arms ached from paddling. He stopped in one of the city squares, where the only bench was occupied by a young woman with dark hair cut short up the back of her neck. She was sitting to the extreme right of the bench, drinking liquid from a plain looking bottle. It was green glass, smooth and tapered in her hand. Kalman sat down on the bench, so much to the extreme left that the corner jabbed into his rear. Shifting, he saw the girl was looking at him.

“Hi,” she said.

“That’s a nice bottle,” said Kalman.

“I’ve had it for years,” said the girl. “It was my mother’s, it was the first bottle of beer she ever drank from.”

“Really? That’s a long time to keep a bottle.” And then, so she wouldn’t think he was being judgmental, Kalman added, “Wow.”

The girl put the bottle against her cheek. “Too hot out here,” she said.

Kalman nodded, and looked quickly at the place between the girl’s breasts. He thought she maybe wasn’t wearing anything under her shirt. Her breasts were the little triangle kind. He thought of the girl with the lazy eye in England, and wondered for the first time what the Belgian had written in his bottle.

“Okay. It wasn’t really my mother’s. I just ripped the label off. It had lemonade in it. But I have had it for a while. Not that long. But a while.”

She looked at a small gold watch she was wearing. “I have to go soon,” she said.

“Right,” said Kalman. “It was nice to meet you.” He held his hand out.

“Do you want to walk me home? It’s not far.”

“Oh,” he said. His sore arms screamed and he winced. “Yeah, okay, definitely.”

She got up somewhat awkwardly, like it was a complicated process. Kalman thought her feet looked unusually large. They walked along the street for a short while without talking. The girl kicked a rock, twice, and then missed.

“Do you recognize me,” the girl said.

Kalman flushed, frantically scanning his mind.

“Are you the girl from that coffee commercial?” he said finally. “The one with the yellow flowers?”

“No, no. I work at A&P. I see you come in a lot. I’m a cashier. You buy a lot of root beer.”

For the life of him, Kalman could not place her. She was so young and pretty. He couldn’t believe himself.

“It’s okay,” she said. “That you don’t remember me. That I remember you and you don’t remember me.” Then a short while later: “Well, this is me.”

She had stopped in front of a wooden door, whose stoop was right on the main street. She took a keyring out of her pocket and tried half the keys on it before she managed to get the door open.

“Do you want to come in? I have water in the fridge.”

Inside, her apartment was at the top of the stairs. It was one long, narrow room with several small tables lining the walls. Kalman turned his face from the low bed under the window. He noticed that the walls were covered in mint coloured brocade. He could see the staples just under the ceiling and down above the baseboards.

The girl put her bottle down on the windowsill and fetched two plastic water bottles from the fridge.

“It’s not fancy,” she said. “It’s just store brand.”

Kalman smiled as he tipped it into his mouth. The water was barely cool, as if it hadn’t been in the fridge long.

“I think I had better go,” he said after he finished the water. Before he could leave, she put her hand on his arm. Her face was flushed red when she looked up at him and said, “Could I have some money?”

“I don’t have any money with me,” he said. She nodded and she was chewing on her lip from the inside, pulling her mouth to one side.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“If you need money, why don’t you become a model?” he said.

“I’m not pretty enough,” she said.

“Sure you are.”

“No. I’m really not.” Now she looked angry.

For a moment neither of them said anything and Kalman felt strange.

She took her hand off of his arm.

“Why don’t you come visit me sometime,” she said. She walked to the window and picked up the green glass bottle. “Here,” she said. “You can have this.”

Kalman accepted the bottle and fled to the flat, even street below. He was running before he noticed it and felt cruel when he realized she would have seen from her window. If she was looking.

Kalman took the bottle out of his backpack. He had sealed it with purple wax, buying the coloured candles at the dollar store rather than the plain white ones he usually bought. He thought it looked pretty, the purple wax dripping down the green glass.

He and Martin were sharing a canoe.

“I told you about that girl, the one with the lazy eye, right?” Martin said while he steered the canoe from the back. Kalman was lilypaddling from the front, but Martin was a large man and had no problem moving through the waves without Kalman’s help.

“She found that guy’s bottle. They got married two months later. Isn’t that something?”

“That’s pretty neat.”

Martin was looking out into the open water – or at least in that general direction. Kalman couldn’t see Martin’s eyes behind his sport sunglasses.

“See, it’s all about tides. If you know the tides, you can make your bottle end up wherever you want.”

Kalman nodded. The skin on his upper arms was already starting to burn where his t-shirt left them exposed.

“That’s a nice bottle,” Martin said generously. “Can I see?”

They traded, and Kalman examined Martin’s bottle. It was a clear bottle, maybe one of those summertime coolers that college girls got drunk on. Kalman felt a hook pull behind his navel, like he was in an elevator. The paper inside was yellow.

“What did you write?”

Martin started, and almost dropped his paddle, as if he had forgotten Kalman was there. “In the bottle?”

“Yeah.”

He took off his sunglasses and wiped them on his t-shirt. “You know. Just the usual stuff.” He rubbed the sunglasses meditatively. “Fucking hot out here,” he said.

Then he knelt up in a half-squat, half-stand, so as to not tip the canoe, and whipped his bottle a good forty yards.

“Wow,” said Kalman. “What a toss. But how do you know what the tides are like out there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Martin and he began to turn the boat. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Do you want to throw yours now?”

“I haven’t got an arm like you. That was some throw. I’ll just drop it on the way in. Do bottles close to the shore ever go anywhere?”

“Oh sure. I think that Belgian guy was just standing on a freaking pier when he tossed his. Didn’t even paddle out. And that girl found it, didn’t she?”

Kalman hung his bottle over the front of the boat. He mimed dropping it into the water, dunking his whole hand, but he couldn’t seem to let it go. He yanked the bottle back in and stored it between his feet.

“I’ve got a good feeling about that one,” said Martin. “Somebody’s going to get these.”

She said: “lie down on the bed with me,” and Kalman did. He could hardly believe he’d even knocked on the door.

“So what do you do, Kalman?”

“I’m a chemist.”

“Cool. Did you go to school for a long time?”

“A while. Not as long as I could have.”

“So what exactly do you do? Are you trying to cure cancer and that sort of thing?”

“I work for a food company. My job is to figure out how to get the dehydrated ingredients in a dried package to taste like the chef’s recipes. Like those pasta side dishes. Soup. You know what I mean? Do you ever make those?”

“You mean the ones you add water to? Or milk?”

“Yeah. Sometimes butter too. The butter makes a big difference. The lipids  – well, it’s not important.”

“That’s an interesting job. Much better than being a cashier.”

“Are you in school?”

“No.”

“What do you want to do when you’re done being a cashier?”

“I dunno. Maybe go somewhere. Travel. If I can save enough.”

Talking like this was surreal to Kalman. He felt like an undergrad, as if he should have a joint between his fingers and be lying on his side, head propped on his fist. He remembered such conversations from his university days; it was the way he used to talk to Angela when they first started dating. Talking about the things they would do, how she would get a tenure-track position and Kalman would go into research.

There had been after a ski trip on their reading break. They were traveling back in a handful of borrowed station wagons, each of them half empty, the arrangements dictated by the social politics of their university circle. Kalman was in a backseat, stretched across the length of it, seatbeat off, a guitar at his feet. There was a sound like a gunshot and then, for no reason at all, the back window transformed itself into bubbles. Before he had time to think, it fell in, and the bubbles were tiny pieces of glass pebbling his legs. A few shapely teeth remained at the borders but otherwise the whole of it was spread out on Kalman’s body, his seat, already getting lost under the seatbeat fastener. They never knew what broke it – a rock flying up, a pre-existing crack, faulty manufacturing. It didn’t matter.

“Don’t move,” said Angela, who was driving. “I’ll get off the highway.”

She ushered their friends into Wendy’s for hamburgers and climbed into the backseat with him, methodically picking the glass off, throwing it into a paper bag she’d snatched from the restaurant. When he was free of it, she looked over her shoulder and shut the back door. She climbed up and straddled him, and as she kissed him her long hair got into both of their mouths. She was moaning softly, small underwater noises that Kalman found arousing and embarrassing at the same time. They had already been dating for a few months at the time, but he hadn’t felt comfortable to tell her about the stray piece of glass that had fallen into the waistband of his jeans, that was pressing into his hip as she ground against him.

“Doing nothing is doing something,” she had said to him when she brought the divorce papers home. “But you still don’t understand that, do you?”

The girl was still lying beside Kalman, stretched out so she was taller than him. Her ribs seemed too wide for her small body, and the bottom of her ribcage stuck out strangely under the thin shirt she was wearing.

“I miss the weight of a man on top of me,” she said.

Kalman said, “Do you want me to lie on top of you?” He heard himself say it and was astonished at the recklessness of it. But all he felt was a warm hollowness, a gentle bobbing inside his stomach. Not quite seasick.

She laughed, a big surprising horsey sort of laugh.

“Sure.”

So he got on top of her, not like a lover but like he was floating on her in the ocean, his arms tucked into his sides. He lay his face on her neck, craning back to see her: the giant foreground of chin and jaw, the eyebrow vanishing point so far, far away.

“Feel better?” he asked.

She brought her hand up and stroked his hair. His erection was pressing against her skirt.

“A bit,” she said. After a while she said, “That should do it for now.”

He climbed off and they lay side by side. She rubbed the top of her foot against the sole of his.

“I always notice now when people buy those dehydrated soups and noodles. It makes me think of you.”

Kalman had a terrible impulse to ask her to marry him, sharply followed by an impulse to leave.

“That’s nice of you,” he said.

She got on her knees then and climbed onto him, much as Angela had in the clunky old wood-paneled station wagon. She took off her shirt and her skirt, and then had to stand up to take off her tights. She did it somewhat gracefully.

While they were having sex, Kalman could think nothing, but afterwards, he wanted terribly to say something kind to her, something kind but measured out, something cleanly divided from having to say anything further. She hadn’t opened her eyes the entire time, as if swimming in a chlorinated pool. He ran his hand along her jaw, and under his fingers she was as smooth as glass. Inside her, surely, he had been a message. Something he’d almost been able to read, like when the subtitles of a movie went by only a bit too quickly.

Beside him the girl turned over, preparing to sleep on her side. Even while moving, she kept her eyes closed. It looked strange, like seeing a sleepwalker moving confidently through the dark. Kalman dressed, standing beside the bed and remembering to put his socks back on last. He said nothing, agreeing with the girl that she was asleep when she obviously wasn’t.

Then he left, closing the door gently, half expecting it to shatter in his hand.

Illustration by Jeff Kulak

1.
What on earth did she want from him? From them? Approval? She
was embarrassed by how little she knew, or would own, of her own
motivations.

She was also too hot in her heavy wool coat, and damp, wet really,
hair like feathers stuck to her brow. Add frustrated to the list. After a
decade of intense discipline she found herself suddenly wanting to
smoke, to have random sex, or at least to have distracting fantasies
about these things: she had drifted off into trysts on the airplane, at
the hotel, in the rental car below deck.

The ferry entered Active Pass, a moment of transition she always
loved, and she stepped out onto the deck. Turbulent water churned
cutlery, dinner plates, champagne glasses and bottles tossed off of
boats, tumbling and softening them so they foamed up decades later
on beaches, common as periwinkle and sand dollars.

Shorelines sliced through the fog like cream. She scratched notes in a
hand-sized journal. Tiny illuminations like the lit cabins on the treed
shores where some old part of her still longed to live.

2.
Harlequin ducks carved in Thailand or Bangladesh lined the gift
shop shelves. Local books in racks. The clink of teapots, a cash register.
Horn blast. All the old comforts laced with their irritations. She
recalled hearing Aritha Van Herk read a story set on a ferry years ago
when she was a creative writing student at the university. The local. It
was crass in fiction. Stories were supposed to be set in New York, or
London, or at the very least, in a suspended non-descript place that
resembled the interior of an Alice Munro character.

That week someone had stolen her backpack and she found it hours
later stuffed in a garbage bin on campus with nothing but a personal
letter, her diary, and a packet of photographs taken.

That was the sort of thing that happened in Victoria.

3.
There had been a pod of whales on the previous crossing. People
stared out hopefully even after they left the strait. She stood next to
a Kurt Cobain look-a-like on his way to Botanical Beach. He was a
baker he said, lighting a cigarette for her, he liked to bake scones, she
inhaled deeply, but she did not smoke and quickly felt light-headed.

She left the baker to a rack of younger lambs and sunk into a deep
blue chair, thinking of her stolen diary. How numb she had been. Later,
when he chastised her for being so elusive, so withholding in class,
she knew he had taken it.

As painful as it had been, that loss had been a blessing. She had not yet
understood that she had been lying to herself, even in her own diary.

4.
Gulls hung ghost-like in the air. Another horn blasted. The fog refused
to lift. A woman, tall and sweet as meringue, moved past her, so slow
and heavy that she followed her up to the observation deck. Safe up
here, she thought, six stories off the water, but the plywood-covered
window reminded what a rogue wave could do. She considered pushing
the woman against the door and biting the back of her neck, but
her cell phone rang and she was momentarily jolted back to Toronto.

5.
When she lived in Victoria those many years ago, she lived in a house
on Meares. Her flat was on the second floor, a corner unit with a
large south-facing window. She used to listen to soundtracks—The
Mission, Room With a View—far too loud, and Ellen Smythe, author of
several unpublished Harlequins that needed proofreading, was often
up to complain. She was big bosomed, sixtyish (though it occurred to
her that she was probably only 40), short, hair dyed blond, face like
powdered linen, and very, very hungry. She had been there that first,
exhilarating, day, knocking quickly.

A laugh, unexpected, set off car alarms three blocks down. Her landlady
blushed at her standing in a T-shirt and turned without asking
whatever it was she wanted to ask. She went back to her bedroom and
there they were, like hungry, doting parents, urging her back to bed.

6.
He suggests they walk to Cadboro Bay, and so they do. The air was
warm, but it was windy and they were almost sideways, against it.
Everyone talked about the weather in Victoria, but no one mentioned
the persistent wind. He loped ahead of her like a much younger man,
slipping down a trail with too many logs, round and slippery as oil
drums. She was wearing the wrong coat. The wrong shoes. Staying
upright demanded all of her attention. They had two children, he said,
rolling his eyes, and yes, he had published several books since. She
had noticed, she said, waiting for a comment on her own work. He
took his binoculars out from under his jacket.

You see, he said, the Harlequins are there. And they were, chestnut
and slate, the male a slightly off Tao. They roiled in the rockiest point
in the bay; tumbling where the waves crashed and currents shifted
quickly. They mate high in swift mountain streams, he said. They nest
in crevices. From where they stood they could not hear the squeaks
and whistles of joy as they wrenched mussels and barnacles, crabs
and crustaceans.

7.
It would have been better to meet indoors, she thought. Here it was
though he was made of rubber and feathers, drifting on stilts, absolutely
free of any memory of her body, any obligation of mind. And
yet he was the one that started it with her. He, who on one of their
post workshop outings, had slipped his hand between her legs under
the table as he regaled the class with having met Carver. She found
his audacity, his control, thrilling. You have to meet my wife, he said,
brushing her breast with his arm, she will love you.

8.
He asked how she was, and he listened and nodded. He kept his body
at an angle, an elbow between them.

She knew by then that she had been one of many. Everyone knew:
each year a new affair proceeded in a startlingly similar fashion. She
had merely been a sheet of excitement, a shimmer of lubricant they
penetrated each other through. That’s what mentorship looks like for
women, someone said.

The day, drawing to a close around them, felt as turbulent as it was
the day she left well over a decade ago. She had not told anyone she
was applying to another program and this turned out to be a great
convenience.

9.
And how is Di, she asked finally. He pointed to another cluster of
ducks as if he couldn’t quite hear her, and it occurred to her that he
hadn’t told Di that she had contacted him. Triumph is overrated, she
thought. That she had moved so far along in her career, that she had a
partner, that she was happy, successful, none of this shielded her from
the stab of this omission.

He stopped suddenly, facing her directly. Were you always a lesbian,
or did you just not know at the time?

Why, she said, would that be breaking the rules? She stopped herself
from saying something cruel about how she had never cared what he
thought of her. That it had always been about his wife. That Di was
delicious, like trying to find a single strawberry in a bowl of whipped
cream. Surely he must know that.

There will be a small gathering after the reading, he said. Come. He
walked on, binoculars at the ready, sure and quiet, as if he was leaving
a trail of crumbs.

SINA QUEYRAS is the author of MxT and Autobiography of Childhood,
both from Coach House.