an annual review of short fiction
Volume 14 Spring 2025
Produced at Victoria College in the University of Toronto
Masthead
Co-Editors-in-ChiEf
Sabina García Ortega & Athen Go
hEad illustrator
Elaine Xiao
assoCiatE Editors
Simona Zaunius
Tamara Doiny
Kenzie Johnston
Daniyah Pervaiz
Emma Braho
Lily Mengual
Cedric Pak
illustrators
Athen Go
Kasia Kaczmarek
Biew Biew Sakulwannadee
Zo Friedman
Naomi Marcus
Mio Sugiura
layout Editors
Charlyn Ann Lapak
Sophie Zhang
Layout supervised by Sabina García Ortega
Cover art by Elaine Xiao
Editors' Note
In migration, Canada Geese fly in a distinctive V-shape. With clear sight of the geese ahead, the flock follows, gliding in the uplift of their synchronized wingbeats. Like the geese, the stories in this year’s edition acknowledge that which has carved their path; the cultural landscapes, interpersonal relationships, and experiences that inform their work. From forthright epigraphs and dedications, to allusions and intertextualities simmering beneath the surface, you’ll find these traces scrawled across the pages that follow—apparent, or subtle, but always perceptible. Each story reminds us that that which surrounds us, even if often unknowingly, takes root within us, beating like the steady rhythm of the wings overhead.
We are proud to present you with the product of months of dedication from UofT’s creative community. To all the new and returning contributors who have generously shared their time, effort, and artistry with us, we extend our deepest thanks for choosing Goose to hold the products of these. We are continually in awe of the sheer multitude of voices and worlds bound within these pages. Finally, to our team here at Goose, none of this would have been possible without you: thank you for being a part of our flock.
In the same way that the geese ahead fall behind to let another take over, it is with heavy hearts that we, editors-in-chief, close our final chapter with the Goose—heavy with pride in what we’ve built together, and heavy with gratitude for what this journal has given us. We leave with the confidence that Goose will continue to soar on the collective strength of those who have come before, and those who will come after.
With undying love, Sabina García Ortega & Athen Chloe Go Co-Editors-in-Chief, 2024-2025
The Beautiful Ones
Still Waters
Accelerator
Joan
Clinging Smoke
Bear
goûter de mille-pattes
Metaphysical Pepto
Create-a-Sim
Float
Dead Fish ROLL CREDITS
About the Authors
Divine Angubua
Tehlan Lenius
Cameron Boese
Victoria Li
Charlotte Lai
Nghi Nguyen
Ella MacCormack
Zo Friedman
Audrey Lai
Ayesha Siddiqui
Audrey Lai
Elias Ye
The Beautiful Ones
Divine Angubua
CW: Child abuse, death, forced marriage
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”
One woman, a spectre from our childhood. A girl with the darkest skin and the whitest eyes we have ever seen, frying plantain on the charcoal stove, blowing into the red coals until they glow with glee. The fire feasts on the warm breath, taking, asking, and taking. We liked the plantain, although our mother insisted that they were burnt and dry. “It’s like your mother never taught you how to cook,” she said to the girl with a smile. The smile warned the girl that if she didn’t learn to control the fire in the charcoal, hold that heat which grew out of her mouth like the voice of a small god, the city would hold her instead, and smash her flat like clay.
We don’t remember how it happened, but something happened. The girl would not stop urinating on her bed. She left lights on all over the house. Our mother started yelling at her and calling her names.
Our mother never talked about this, but we saw the girl walking around the compound at night, running into the banana plantation barefoot in the dark, and waking up screaming with a mouth full of dug-up roots.
“Money! Does not! Grow! On trees!” our mother yelled as she beat the girl, “You ought to be grateful that you can even use my electricity.”
Her food did not always taste good. The matooke was sometimes undercooked, or the posho too overcooked, just too poor for our mother’s tastes. One day the girl held a saucepan of millet porridge and dropped it on the ground. Our mother made her lie down in the hot, thick, brown stuff
and beat her hands with the peeled branch of an orange tree. She called the stick “White Angel.” Another day, we came back from school and the girl was not there. “I caught her trying to steal my silver forks,” our mother said, “Let her go back to her father’s village and dig for gold.”
One day, as our mother brought us home from the dentist, we came upon a crowd somewhere close to our neighbourhood of Ministers’ Village, not too far from our old kindergarten. Men, women, little children in clean, colourful school uniforms, hawkers, boda-boda men, smelly street people with torn clothes and no shoes. They yelled in languages we did not understand. They looked happy. They ululated. They danced.
“They have caught a thief,” our mother told us, beckoning the driver to stop the car so that we could all watch. She recited to us a bible verse, a warning, a lesson: “Cut your right hand off if it causes you to steal.”
We gazed, slack-jawed with excitement, through the car window. All fleshy mouths that exposed missing teeth. Our mother hooted at the crowd, egging them on, and we cheered—the bad guy had been caught.
The smell of meat, like a barbeque without salt, spice, or nice music, washed over us like the March rain. The shouting, the flesh, the burning, roared like a sacrifice being sent up to heaven.
In the middle of the road, the thief was bound at the hands and fixed inside a large stack of rubber tires. People in the crowd doused him in oil. As the flames climbed, he screamed, and so we screamed back, with laughter. As he fought to escape, they beat him with long sticks. The tires melted into his skin. We saw a group of schoolchildren throwing bits of rocks and plastic at the thief, which made him scream even more. He was missing teeth too, and we laughed at that.
From inside the flames, the thief gazed at us, and it was like looking into an evil mirror. He looked as confused and amazed at the terms of his conditions as we were. How did you end up like this, we wanted to ask him. His expression twinkled like our faces did, as though he wanted to laugh, like we did, at the fact that he was burning in the oil that he stole from one of the minister’s houses.
“Why was the oil at the minister’s house mama?” we asked.
“Ahh, that is not my business,” our mother said, laughing a little. “Maybe
you can ask your father that question.”
That night, as The General watched the news, our mother sat with him and we sat around her. The thief was the gateman for one of the ministers. The gatemen had organized themselves to steal all the oil in Ministers’ Village. Many were caught. Only one was burned. Many still escaped. “Why would they steal oil?” our mother asked. The General ignored her and so did we. “It smells so bad when you burn it,” she continued, “You can’t even use that kind for cooking.” For no reason, she started laughing at the footage of the burning thief, giggling sharply as we watched the fire expose the red bone. We stayed quiet and waited for The General to tell her to shut up. We knew better than to ask him why the oil was at the ministers’ houses.
One evening, the General came home with a gap-toothed man who was going to solve our problem of load-shedding by giving us something called ‘sunshine energy,s’ even though our power never really shut down because The General was friends with the boss in charge of electricity in the whole country. He said they were brothers from the first oil war and brothers ought to always support each other. That night, when we said our final ‘amen’ at the family altar, The General said, “I felt something bad in here with us.”
The night the gap-toothed man gave us sunlight in a box was the night we started seeing Him, the man that stood in the corner of our room and pointed a wrinkly, sometimes charred, sometimes manicured, sometimes clawed finger at our beds when we tried to sleep; accusing, beckoning, mocking, warning. We hid under blankets for most of those years to avoid those eyes, but we felt him moving over us anyway. Bloody and black, he slithered across the length of us, licking the air to taste our fear; passing his hands through us, hovering like an apocalypse at the edge of our dreams.
“Whenever you get scared, just clap twice, like this,” The General said, showing us how to use this new sunshine power.
“All the bad dreams will go away when you clap.”
But when we clapped, there the man stood, like a large horrible insect, wingspread in the corner of our room, twisting his face until his mouth started to rip into a permanent, bloody snarl. On many nights we slept with our mother at her side of the house. She was happy to keep us happy however she could. She told us not to clap at night, that when we clapped at night, we
signalled to Walumbe, the evil old man who steals children and makes music with their bones. When we told The General about the man one morning over breakfast in the compound, he made the sign of the cross on our foreheads with olive oil and scolded us for being around our mother too much.
“The road to progress is marked by mockers and scorners,” he said, “This is what I learned in the war. Sometimes things get scary, but nothing is unkillable. Show this man that you can kill him, and then he will become your friend.”
We wondered: but why us? We have accomplished nothing in the name of progress. We are children. And what would we gain from making friends with the dead?
One morning, we woke up to the smell of meats frying and stews boiling. Our mother was setting one of her rare lunch feasts which required we skip breakfast. The night before, the President, his wife, and their beautiful daughters were shot dead in their beds by their own guards. Many big men and women of Uganda were hung up on street lamps all over the city. The entire world seemed to make itself small and everything became so quiet. This was the night The General came home with the good news of his promotion, bearing a new grand stove for the kitchen, and three new orange tanks of gas in the trunk of his car.
“We are taking the first step into the first world,” he told us, afloat with laughter, “We are making all things new!”
When we rushed to lift the tanks, our mother snapped at us, “Let the maids do it! If your small arms drop one of those and we all explode, what will you say to God?” So we watched as our maids; the small one, the fat one, and the old one; hurled the metal cylinders all the way to the kitchen storage, swaying from the weight of the tanks, sticking their legs out awkwardly as they tried to find their balance. Over the lunch feast, we asked, “Why is the gas so heavy?” The General sat at the head of the table with a half-eaten chicken gizzard in his hand. “Because it is a special gas,” he said, “It comes from the ground. It is full of the things of life, and all of it is ours.”
Some time ago, our mother took us to the farm with her. Many of our cows had stopped eating. Many more were bloated and couldn’t sleep either, so they clustered together and mooed all day and all night. I imagined that
they were in pain, and all that mooing was really the cows screaming for help. “Release us from the gas! It hurts! We are going to explode! Help us!” Our mother gathered a few farmhands and went to see the cows one by one. Everything smelled like poop and grass. She ordered the farm hands to hold down a pretty brown cow, an Ankole mother with large pearly horns. They spread her legs wide until the soft pink flesh of her udders hung out. We felt ashamed, and a little frightened, but not enough to look away. Our mother made two holes in the cow’s stomach with a big needle. Then, she sewed the holes together and turned the cow over. Soon enough, the cow began to fart and pass the gas. We laughed because it was funny. As we consumed our mother’s feast that day, we imagined that the gas that gave us our food had been taken out of the earth in the same way. We saw big, strong men digging through the earth’s softest ground, finding her sweetest parts with their machines, and spreading her open. We saw them wringing her soils dry as she oozed out her deepest moisture, all those things of life. And we saw that she liked it, the feeling of men’s fingers seeking, ripping through her middle to release life’s sweetness and treasure.
When we left the dining table in those days, and the day of the big feast especially, sleepy from all that we had eaten, we made sure to say, “Thank you Mummy for the food.”
One week, our mother did not want to leave her room. The same week, the entire week, every year, every October. When we asked her why, she said, “I can’t, I’m tired.” Every October, when The General went out for the Uganda National Independence Day celebrations and appeared on TV with the president, our mother became so sick that she couldn’t go with him. It was odd, and sometimes we thought she was playing a game, a very long and boring game, with The General.
For seven days, she kept to the corners of the house and sulked like a nimbus cloud. Everything darkened under her mood. She became suddenly old and monstrous, frail and ugly. A thick terrible smell followed her around like an invisible shadow. She got us up for school in the morning but packed the wrong lunches. She mixed up our names and yelled at us. She complained of headaches nonstop and told us no interesting stories. When she went outside, she would lie down in the compound for hours; on the red brick ground, in
the garden, on the patio, in the gazebo, on the verandah, under the Kampala sun like a dead fish at the Friday market. When we asked The General about this, he said that she was just sick. “Leave her alone,” he said, “You know how women are. Sometimes hot, sometimes cold. She’ll come around.”
We don’t know anything, but we know that long ago, our mother and The General met during the week of Independence Day celebrations, at the height of the war, when his army won the final fight against the other army, the bad army, and rescued the government. When, in their victory, The General’s soldiers walked into the homes of their enemies and took whatever they wanted. Their cows and goats, their large sofa chairs and fancy wall paintings, their food and clothes, TVs and generators, and even the houses themselves.
Some soldiers also took from their enemies their own wives and daughters, who were given in exchange for their lives spared or pried away from the dead hands of their fathers and husbands.
Only the beautiful ones, anyway.
We didn’t know anything, but our mother called him The General, and so did we. Whatever he asked of her, she did obediently, quietly, and with a beauty so restrained that she seemed to glow with its barely kept power. We know that he loved her because he never hurt her, or brought home other women. He must have loved her, because he loved us. The General. He loved us.
Kasia Kaczmarek
One day, on the last day of Independence Day celebrations, when The General’s friends came to our home drunk on bushera and waragi, we heard The General giving a big speech in the living room. “Look at her! Look at those eyes, look at those thighs, look at that mouth!” Laughter roared, hands clapped and bottles clinked.
“She is the best gift I ever received,” he announced, “And look at all of those little ones she has given me, I cannot even count them anymore! Ha!” Someone shouted, “God has been good eh!” and the room exploded into cheers.
We don’t know anything, but after the Independence Day celebrations, our mother was our mother again. Cold, now hot. You know how women are.
One school night, the story broke that more oil had been discovered in the west of the country. It was all over the news. Could this be a turning point for our nation? The drawing up of contracts with big investors; the Chinese, the Canadians, the Americans? Could this fix the country’s brain drain? The MPs started fighting in parliament. Some of them wanted to come together and keep the oil in the hands of the people, send the money to the people’s pockets, and make the people richer. Others wanted to sell the oil and open the country up to people who knew better what to do with it. They called each other cockroaches and rats. They leaped over tables and tried to strangle each other.
“It’s happening again,” The General said, “They want to sell our country to the bazungu again. The white rats.”
We were children, and we feared what he meant, what the tired light inside his eyes told us. When the president, who was also The General’s friend from the first oil war, appointed his eighteen-year-old niece as the country’s minister for oil and extraction, The General said, “This is stupid bullshit.”
The Generals gathered in the living room over many nights under hushed whispers. The Generals told us nothing, but with time our mother became more and more sick, sicker than she had ever been, and that told us everything. In those days when she was trapped in her bed, we asked her to tell us stories. We feared that if she didn’t talk to us, she would never talk again. One day, she crawled out of bed on her hands and knees and begged The General to send us away, to spare us from what was about to happen.
“So what if the Americans and Chinese take that oil?,” she pleaded, “ One way, or another, they will win. These bazungu and their money will always win, but what does it matter? None of your children will be here to remember you for trying to be a hero because they will all be dead.”
One night, the last time that we saw our mother and The General, the soldier that drove us to the airport the next morning turned on the radio news broadcast. Some of us wept, a few of us went away inside themselves and did not return, and others swallowed it all with the last lunch that our mother made for us; chapati with fried eggs, so that the last thing she gave to us was our favourite thing, and chocolate biscuits because she said she must leave us with something sweet. On the radio news broadcast, they announced that a drone had dropped bombs on Ministers’ Village. Nearly one hundred people were blown to dust as the sun rose over Kamapala’s seven hills. When our mother would have been in the garden saying her first prayer of the day, the prayer seeking forgiveness and the purification of the soul. They announced that The General and all his household were dead, and it all felt like a grand game of cat and mouse, tit for tat, tag, you’re it. The president’s army had set up roadblocks all over the city. Big men and women were being burned alive in the streets with their wives and children. Many generals were suddenly nowhere to be found.
We were children.
Another day, the country’s delegation took one hundred representatives to the big oil conference in America. Those representatives brought their wives and husbands and lovers, and those brought their children and cousins and best friends too because the conference was in America, a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing. On the TV screen we see the new general, an old friend of our father, one of his friends from the first oil war, turned enemy in the second oil war. He holds a microphone and asks, “We have the earth, but now, how may we harness the sun?” Our mother stands behind him. Among the rest of his beautiful wives, she is like a pearl in the sand. She smiles at us through the TV. She looks happy. Her hair is black, her bones are young, her teeth are white. The General poses for pictures. Everyone looks happy to be there in America. They all agree that what the country needs after all is simply more money, more pity and charity from America and its friends. “We are a global network,” The General says, “We ought to always support each other.”
We are no longer children.
Nowadays, we listen to the radio news broadcasts a lot. It is an election year in Uganda again, and we are thinking of going back. We are thinking of our mother. The General has an army building around the cobalt and diamonds there. There was another oil terminal blast in the south of the country; several were injured and some were killed.
“But we shall mourn at the reaping of the harvest,” The General says. The country is turning to nuclear energy to solve its problem of power. New gas contracts are being written. The great lake is gone.
Sometimes we clap our hands at night to help ourselves remember our mother better. We saw a lot. Some of us have died because of what we saw as children. We try to remember her smile and her laugh. Her bright face and her soft hugs. We remember her cooking. We remember her sickness. We remember that she left us with something sweet. Sometimes, when we clap hard enough and believe, and listen, we hear her coming back to us. We will not go back to Uganda, but it is nice to feel that our mother is coming to bring us home. She is coming to take us away to a perfect place. She emerges out of the corners of our rooms. She is pointing with a long red fingernail, accusing, beckoning, mocking, warning. We do not care: all that matters is that our beautiful mother is here.
Still Waters
Tehlan Lenius
CW: Death
In loving memory of Buh
We scattered Opa’s ashes on the lake near our cottage, the one that he and Dad and Uncle Karl built with their bare hands because Oma always said she wanted one, even if it was just a shack on a cheap plot of land in The Middle of Nowhere, Ontario. It was so far out of the way that Opa used to say it was where the fox and the hare say goodnight. For a long time, I thought he was talking about a real fox and a real hare, but he wasn’t. He just meant that out there, even the hunters and the hunted didn’t fight; they just called it a day. I remember thinking that that was the best way to put it because when we piled all our stuff in the car and made the drive up North, it always took so long to get there that everything else felt so far away.
This time, all of us went up—me, Oscar, our parents, Uncle Karl, Aunt Maya, Oma, and my cousins, Josie and Luke. The cottage wasn’t big enough, but it was just for one weekend and we made it work. I had to sleep on the floor next to my brother. I didn’t mind, though. It made it feel like a special sleepover. Oma told me it’s better for your back, too.
The next day, we took the canoes out to the middle of the lake. Mom and Dad paddled ours while me and Oscar knelt in the middle, occasionally leaning over and reaching down to skim our hands along the surface of the water as we sailed past. We didn’t stop until the cottage looked far, far away, the afternoon sun shining down and reflecting off the lake.
Oma had the box with Opa’s ashes, the oak wood smooth and shiny with little carvings along the edges. When she opened it up, it got quiet—the kind of quiet that my brother, our cousins, and even I knew not to break. Even
when I shifted and kicked Oscar by accident, he didn’t look at me and we didn’t say anything.
She set it down on the rim of the canoe and tipped it over the edge just a little so the ashes would slip into the water. Oma let them go slowly, bit by bit, until the box was empty and he was gone. I watched the last of the ashes sink down out of sight and I remember thinking that it would be okay because Opa knew how to swim. We stayed there for a little while, the canoes bobbing gently with the waves.
Before we left, Oma said a few words about how much he meant to her. Uncle Karl did too, but Dad didn’t. I was never close with my father. He said it twice the day Opa died and three times at his funeral. He laid down the words like a challenge each time, as if daring people to pity him and see what came of it. No one ever fought him on it, not that I saw.
I heard him say it again when we got back, when Mom tried to take him aside and talk to him. He shrugged her off and headed to the cottage, which was weird because he usually stayed to help lift the canoes back onto the rack. Mom, Uncle Karl and Aunt Maya did it themselves, without him. They had to ban Oma from trying to help and made her stand ten feet away, shutting down her arguments that she wasn’t that old and they didn’t know what they were talking about. Us kids tried to help too, but I don’t think we were very helpful. Our parents told us we could go down to the lake and swim until dinner, so we did.
We played chicken for a long time—me on my brother’s shoulders and Luke on Josie’s. At one point, Oscar and I won four times in a row and Luke got so upset about it that he went and sat on the shore with his arms crossed. He said we were cheating, but we weren’t. We were just better at it. We started playing a different game and it didn’t take long for him to give up sulking and come back in the water.
We were taking turns jumping off the end of the dock when Mom came to get us, calling from the shore that dinner was ready. None of us protested, realizing how hungry we were the second she mentioned dinner and racing each other all the way back to the cottage. Josie was always the fastest runner and she got there first, but I got there second, way before Oscar and Luke. We didn’t bother changing into dry clothes since we were eating outside, sitting on the grass around the firepit while Oma and our parents were on
camping chairs. The smoke from the fire drifted up into the sky where the sun had started to go down, the heat subsiding just a little.
Once everyone had their plates, Oma started to tell stories about Opa. We had all heard them before, but we listened anyway. Oma was always a good storyteller. She did the voices and made big gestures, and when she laughed at the end, you wanted to laugh too, even if it wasn’t really all that funny. She told us about the time they were redoing the basement and the electricians said it was impossible to wire the lights the way she asked them to, so Opa told them to leave and rewired the entire thing himself, just the way she wanted. Uncle Karl chipped in, talking about the time he saw Opa hammer his thumb by accident and barely react. He just looked at it for a second, shook his hand a few times, then moved on to the next nail and kept hammering away. A few days later, his thumb was all purple, but he didn’t complain then either.
It was easy to imagine the stories in my head. Opa was always in his workshop. I liked to watch him sometimes, even if he never talked while he did stuff. I would sit on his spinny stool, gripping the top of the workbench and swivelling this way and that while he measured and cut and built. Opa could do that. Create something out of nothing. He taught Dad and Uncle Karl how to do it too. Dad could fix anything with a toolbox and some time, but when things broke in our house, he would still call Opa first and ask him what to do.
I glanced over at my dad to see if he would tell a story too, but he was busy staring at his plate. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look up, either. Some of my friends back home said that he was scary when he did stuff like that. I never really understood what they were talking about. They always called him “sir” too, even though no one told them to and they didn’t do it with anyone else’s dad.
I wanted to go up to him and ask why he hadn’t eaten anything yet, and if I could have his potatoes if he didn’t want them, but Mom said not now, maybe later. I could sit in her lap instead, and I did, crawling into her arms and leaning back against her chest. No one else noticed when Dad left, or if they did, they didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything either. I just watched him disappear into the woods, staring after him for a long time, until the sky dimmed a few shades and the shadows grew longer. We all knew that meant
it was time to start heading back inside.
Oscar stacked the metal plates and Josie helped fold up the chairs. I collected all the cutlery because that was always my job when we were cleaning up, but I didn’t want to go into the cottage with everyone else. I knew how crowded it would be with Mom and Uncle Karl and Aunt Maya and Oma and Luke and Oscar and Josie. Besides, there wasn’t much to do in there anyway. The only game we had was a water-stained Monopoly board. We lost all the houses and player pieces a long time ago and had to use pebbles instead. I could see Oscar looking for some good ones on the ground as we walked over, but I wasn’t really in the mood to lose to him again.
I went into the cottage for just a second before slipping back out, taking my flashlight and starting to look through the woods on my own, like I did every night when we were up there. I still believed in fairies back then, with all my heart, because there was a ring of mushrooms that sprouted in our backyard every spring and sometimes, when I went out to look, there was fairy dust on them. I would get into heated arguments about it all the time with my brother. Oscar was an avid non-believer and he always had to be right.
Mio Sugiura
One night, years later, he would come into my room after bedtime and shake me awake, rushing me to the window. I was half asleep at that point, groggy and groaning, but he took me by the arm and wouldn’t stop pointing until I looked.
“See, I was right. They’re fake,” he declared, and after I was done rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I looked out the window to see our dad in the backyard, standing over the ring of mushrooms with a jar of glitter that looked a lot like fairy dust.
I knew from the triumphant look on my brother’s face that this discovery was meant to devastate me, and at first I thought it would too, but it didn’t. I kept pretending that I still believed in them for another few years, acting just as excited as I always did, but sometimes I’d wake up extra early in the morning to peek out my window and see my dad in his work clothes, crouched over the ring of mushrooms and sprinkling glitter on my little fairy garden.
There were fairies at the cottage too. Not always, but I liked to look. The dust was different colours from the dust back home, and sometimes there were even little threads. I left some quarters and a thimble for them once. I thought maybe they would come, because today was a special day, but I looked especially hard in all the usual places and didn’t find anything.
The forest floor began to glow as the sun sank out of sight. I had my flashlight, but I didn’t think I’d need it. I always planned to get back before dark. I took the shortcut that went off the beaten path—the one that we weren’t supposed to use because that part of the woods was full of ticks—but it was ten minutes faster and Lyme disease doesn’t exist when you’re seven. I hopped over a patch of mud, my eye catching on something beyond the trees, by the lake’s shoreline. Abandoning the path home, I crept closer to the edge of the woods and recognized my dad sitting alone at the end of the dock.
I ducked under the branches and ran out onto the open shore. Smooth sand gave way to creaky planks under my feet as I reached the dock, the old wood groaning under my weight. I wanted to ask my dad what he was doing there, but as I neared, my footsteps slowed to a stop and the words melted on my tongue.
There was a quiet at the end of the dock. It was the same quiet as the one when Oma opened the box with Opa’s ashes. It settled around him like the surface of the lake, the water undisturbed. I waited for him to turn around, not wanting to make any waves, but when he didn’t, I walked over and crawled into his lap, inviting myself to make room and settle in with my back against his
chest. I kicked my heels absently against the dock, the thuds soft and muted. I didn’t notice that his shoulders were shaking until my feet slowed to a stop.
Dad’s arms tightened around me, his breath hitching in his chest, and for a panicked moment, I didn’t know what to do. When I was upset, Mom would always judge how silly the reason was. Depending on what she decided, she would tell me to either talk about it or get over it, but I didn’t think my dad would want to do either, so I did what he always did when I cried. I didn’t say anything. I rose and fell with his shaky breaths, pretending not to hear his muffled sobs. And I stayed.
We watched the sun burn the blue from the sky, deep reds and oranges reflected on the lake and rippling across the surface. A loon called out from somewhere far away, and a few birds flew low, right above the water, chirping to one another. My eyes followed them all the way to the forest, their shapes disappearing into the trees, but their voices still echoing around us and riding the soft summer breeze.
Opa told me once that all songbirds have to learn their songs from older birds. The melody isn’t instinctual, but one continuous song, sung by every generation of the species. I listened to the melodies, trying to imagine what they must’ve sounded like a long time ago—how much they’d changed or stayed the same. The birdsongs slowly flickered out like lights, one by one, as the first stars blinked to life. The chirping of the crickets took their place and the colours in the sky bled away into the silver glow of moonlight.
Dad straightened his back and cleared his throat, and I knew that meant we were ready to go. He gave me a little kiss on the head and I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist, holding on while he stood up. He carried me down the dock, my cheek resting on his shoulder, and as we headed back toward the woods, all I could think about was how Mom was going to kill us. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I don’t think Dad did either. I felt a little bad knowing how worried she must be, but part of me liked that no one knew where we were. It meant that me and my dad were in our own little world, where no one could find us, not even Mom. I looked up before we reached the trees, because there were always more stars in the sky at the cottage than there ever were back home, and it made sense to me why Opa would want to live here—way out where the fox and the hare say goodnight, and the world stops at the end of the dock.
Accelerator
Cameron Boese
CW: Substance use, vomit, gore, police brutality, death
The hot fire of summer is inhaling its last oxygen, while cool pools of air wait patiently at its feet. The day is almost over, wind whistling through the waning leaves and emaciating branches. When the wind picks up, it carries with it the sweet-sourness of leaves turning before they drop and meander lazily toward their final resting place beneath the dirt. By the time the stench of decomposition breaks loose, the frozen earth will close, trapping it underneath. I take a breath I feel I could hold forever.
It’s 4:30 in the afternoon and already getting dark. I’m standing at the intersection between Kent and Allenworth, holding a copy of War and Peace I’ve read maybe a quarter of. I’m meeting Jake and Shaney at the Queens Pub between the Wendy’s that used to be a Burger King and the bike shop with three boards nailed haphazardly across its rusting door. I feel clear, like a cool glass of water. Part of me wants to stay out here for a while longer, breathing in the fall air, but I’m already running late. The world stops for no one.
When I walk in they’re already talking about it. Everyone has been. They pause for a minute and Shaney asks how I’ve been, and I say all the usual, then Jake asks a couple questions out of courtesy, his eyes impatient. Three of the four TV screens tacked across the ugly brick walls are on the news channel, the last one showing cricket. Jake nods his head toward the first. He asks me what I think of the new thing they’ve discovered, the particle accelerator that isn’t a particle accelerator, or whatever they’re calling it now; it has a few names, from what I gather. I say I don’t know, really, I dropped physics in high school, pinching my cheeks into an
awkward smile. Shaney is shaking her head. She says she doesn’t think we’re ready for what’s next, for what this could mean for us. They’re already running tests down in Nebraska, in some open fields, and Russia is building a device. The men in red jerseys are winning the cricket match, wacking the balls with their funny-looking rackets. One of them has a mole on his nose the size of a quarter. I’d hate to have one of those, would probably have to get it excised and replaced with a blotchy skin graft, ruining my life. When I tune back in, Jake and Shaney are going on without noticing I’m not listening, their eyes locked onto each other. For the first time tonight, I feel cold.
I’m standing in the middle of a communist literature fair listening to a playlist I don’t particularly like. My wired earbuds crackle and distort the sound when I twist them around my fingers. I was supposed to meet my friend Dillon here, but he cancelled at the last minute to go to the anti-arms protest on the west side. He says innovation is the industry of catastrophe, and something about the American government and war profiteering. I’ve never been very political myself.
Freshly abandoned, I can’t help but feel as though I’m out of place, wideeyed and gawking at the piles of pale books with titles I don’t recognize. I meet a girl with mousy brown hair and glasses with perfect circle frames. She asks me what I do. I tell her I’m a poet, and believe the words too, despite not having written in several months now. I ask her the same, and she responds, but I don’t remember what she says. It’s winter, and I know that things are happening. People are talking about the particle accelerator, and I don't know what it does besides accelerate. Physics has become a runaway science, and all the things we used to know, that I never knew, are being replaced with new answers and new questions with answers we haven’t discovered yet. NASA is sending new probes into space and no longer talks to journalists, and China is building a railway system that moves at speeds unimaginable. Everyone is talking about weaponry. I didn’t think we were at war. In the streets, people scream about bombs, and I no longer watch the news. I turn the TV off, and try to quell the metastasizing panic taking hold inside my stomach.
My reflection moves opposite to me, disappearing behind storefronts and signs, reappearing again in the window panes, his eyes locked onto mine. I monitor my gait, slightly rushed, slow it, reconsider the sweater I paired with my pants, too forced, check my hair, check it again. There’s never enough time. I turn my attention to the faces of the people passing by, settle on the homeless man that yells nonsense on the street corner. His face is sunken and his eyes possess the unmistakable, unfocused wildness of delusion, his mouth drawn into a sneer. My gaze drags over his pock-marked skin, irreversibly marred by time and drugs and maybe other things, and a shiver runs down my spine. I give him a wide berth, clinging to my clean clothes and clear skin and intelligent eyes, as if ugliness is a thing I could catch, that transient destroyer.
I’ve been smoking cigarettes every day and smoking weed every night. When my friends talk about the accelerator and the government and the trouble overseas, my eyes glaze over and I fix my vision on a singular point on the wall until everything goes quiet. I have no job and no responsibilities. When I get home I try to write a little, crumple the page, start over, give up. Words that used to spill from my chest in uncontainable force now elude me, and every one I conjure up feels manufactured and hollow. Everything I produce resembles the shadow of another, variations on themes perfected centuries ago, regurgitated with all of the angst and none of the feeling. I can’t believe I used to think I was a writer.
I’m at a house party in a crowded apartment that smells like smoke and body odour, and I’m halfway through a joint when someone with a name I don’t remember asks me what I’m studying. I say urban geographies, don’t mention that I’ve had my degree for six, maybe seven months. He nods enthusiastically and asks me how it’s going. I tell him I have a perfect GPA, and he smiles blankly as if I hadn’t really answered his question, before walking off. A short girl with lopsided eyebrows asks me if I’m worried about finding work, seeing as everyone’s looking to hire physicists, computer engineers, STEM people, and that sort of stuff. I ask her what she means and she looks at me confused. I guess I hadn’t even really thought about it. My parents have a fair amount of money, but I don’t say that, just laugh and nod. I’m worried it doesn’t come off right. It’s not like I chose urban
geographies because of its booming industry, although I hadn’t really thought about what might come next. What my place might be in a world moving so fast. Other people in the program would talk about how they could never see the city the same way again, and I would nod along as if I understood completely, as if I too could be profoundly changed. I feel hot and anxious. I search the faces of the people at the party and admit selfconsciously to myself that I wish someone would hold me. I hadn’t realized I felt so alone.
I meet him in the library after abandoning Atonement in the fifth chapter. He has dark hair and a lopsided smile, and eyes that fix onto me, steady and searching. I feel it right away, that hunger stirring inside me, cold and desperate. The last one must have been Marie, in year two, with kind, empty eyes and long brown hair. We’d tried for a little bit, but something was wrong, and it ended with me feeling more hollow than before.
Now we’re walking hand-in-awkward-hand, this dark-haired Ivan and I, on our way back to my apartment. He’s studying bioengineering and has a million thoughts on this accelerator, what it could mean if Russia finishes their device (the axel?), the failure of the American government, and so on and so forth. I just watch his lips move, listening to the smooth timbre of his voice. I wish he would just talk about the trees stripped bare in winter, or the way I did my hair today, or anything else at all, but I don’t let it bother me too much. I let the words fade to their basest sounds, and focus on the feeling of his skin against mine.
When we get back to my apartment he is slow and patient. We have wine at five, eat next to nothing, learn little about each other, outlines of the surface. I’m getting sweaty and impatient, some thick cord in my stomach tightening. His face is beautiful, full of depth and hard lines, unmistakably unique, but I know deep down he could be anyone. His fingers are long and delicate, stroking his cheek thoughtfully while he speaks. All I know how to do is stare. After a while we move closer, warmed by the wine. Our fingers intertwine and I lean into him. He asks me something and I say please, then our shirts are slipping over our shoulders, revealing vulnerable bare skin. And I want more, want it all, my mind filling with fog.
Ivan left thirty minutes ago, after I couldn’t get the vomiting to stop. I probably said something cruel and unfair. I’m clutching my arms around my body, have never felt so thin. I didn’t know what to say, how to explain it. How could I tell that gentle, patient man that even though he did only what I asked of him, I couldn’t shake the feeling of invasion? Still can’t, my chest heaving, head tipped over the toilet bowl, waiting. Our naked bodies, so alien in the lowlight, flushed close with no room for air. Pulsing organs, strange fluid, a sick smell. I gag, and vomit again into the toilet, the bile burning my throat. The images and sensations are raw in my mind, a feeling pressing in, demanding entrance. I see his dark, searching eyes, peering in, asking to know me. I see us, standing together and pressed close, skin to skin. Two people have never looked less human.
When I finally find sleep, I dream that an angel breaks loose from looping chains of stars, and plummets down to land at my bedside. She has white hair and black eyes, and is wearing starched scrubs like a 1960s nurse. In her hand she holds a scalpel of shiny, shifting mercury, with a handle resembling pale bone. With her other hand she gently pushes back my hair, and lowers the scalpel to my forehead, painlessly separating skin. She runs it in a clean circle around my skull, and removes the top of my head, and then my brain. I’m not scared, only watch her work with entranced eyes, my entire body numb and at peace. She combs through the hills and valleys of my cranium, methodical and practiced, and I know she is finding the memories of Ivan and his stranger’s body, lopsided smile. When she finds the right section, she raises that mercury knife and cuts it loose, quick and clean, pressing the grayish-blue tissue shut behind it with the tips of her fingers. She casts it aside like so much nothing, and returns my brain to my head, sews me shut. She kisses my forehead and the scar dissipates into stardust, then she returns to her home in the night sky. I exhale slowly. Once again, I belong only to myself.
And then I wake.
My brother Teddy has been calling me a lot lately, though I usually just
Naomi Marcus
wait for him to go to voicemail. He asks too many questions, like if I’ve been writing recently, or looking for a job, or writing letters demanding our elected officials to place restrictions on accelerator research. He’s always had a strong sense of how the world should be, even since we were kids, lecturing to the bemused faces at the adult table, ever the little genius. He’s only three years older than me, but he grew into himself with an ease and grace I never got the hang of, falling over myself trying to keep up. Teddy, the broadshouldered, sure-faced young man. The athlete and the academic, the shining role model, the ideal big brother. I hated him for it.
We’ve made peace as we’ve grown up, but the diplomatic kind, full of distance. I don’t mind it this way, and it makes me uncomfortable when I can sense he’s making a pointed effort to get to know me. It feels fraudulent, even though a part of me knows that everything he does, he does with an infuriating sincerity. When I finally pick up the phone, he tells me he thinks I’m isolating myself, and that I should make more of an effort to engage with the world, do something fulfilling. He says we should drive up into the mountains out east like we used to, hike through the forest. Says he could use a break, too. I tell him I’m working on some poetry, and I’m going to a protest this Friday. He asks what the protest is for, and I hang up the phone.
Dillon and Avery brought me, Jake and Shaney are here too, somewhere. We’re filling blocks by the dozens, hundreds of bodies pressed together, shouting. I can’t quite get a hold of the chants. Dillon is saying something about power to the workers, automation of jobs. The air stinks of spring and sweat, and we’re slipping over mud making our way to the march’s destination, although where that is I’m not sure. My mouth is dry and I feel out of my depth. My expression must be off, not passionate enough, not animated and angry. I watch myself wade through the crowd, puzzled and overwhelmed, a black sheep trying desperately to fit into the herd. Someone shoves a sign into my hand, and I raise it without reading the words. Jake and Shaney are screaming something, fists pumping in the air. Finally, someone yells police, and the crowd is scattering, officers with riot gear yelling into megaphones. Someone grabs my wrist, must be Dillon, no, Shaney, and we’re running through the streets, tripping over feet, adrenaline rushing. I watch as
I clamber through the streets, fall like an idiot, bruising my bony knees, have to be pulled up by my shirt, humiliated. Some people stay behind, yelling in the officers’ faces, clenching their signs. I turn my back to them and run through the emptying streets, the pounding of my shoes against the concrete echoing in my ears.
I’m trying to write a poem. I try to shape my words around the formless unknown that is the world after the accelerator, this accelerating train running off the tracks, still gaining speed. It’s getting harder to pretend as if this is the same world as the one even just a year ago, as if the ground is not mutating beneath our feet. I could write about the death penalty’s renewal in Canada, the three journalists and rogue physicist marched to their executions. I could write about the device finished in Russia, the Axel, and the ecosystems shattered in its wake. I could write about the work camps, the space race, the threats of war, the “new industrial revolution” or the bombs falling somewhere across the world. But I have no words, have nothing to say. Everything I write is a version of a lie.
It would be another lie to say I understand. Teddy blew up on me and asked how I could witness this destruction and not care, as if I didn’t know I was involved in this whole thing, that this has something to do with everyone. He was angry I wasn’t joining him at the protest, the big one, the one he said would count. I almost told him I did care, but my pride was too great, my face too hot. He left without saying goodbye.
I have a guilt in my gut I try to convince myself is misplaced, doesn’t belong to me. I repeat it like a mantra in the mirror. I give up on the poem. I’m not a poet, never have been. ◊
You are three years old, maybe four, and wading through a field of dandelions. They’re swaying in a meandering breeze, their soft yellow petals burning up with the golden light of evening. In the distance, the gentle rolling-over of green hills murmurs to you, inviting you to wonder what lies beyond.
Your mother is humming a lullaby, picking wildflowers in a lavender
summer dress. She will let you explore the trickling creeks where frogs sometimes hop from stone to stone, but she won’t let you out of her sight. The world is something massive, every horizon a suggestion of some untold adventure. When you fall, the ground meets you softly, catching your small limbs and pushing you back onto runaway feet.
You are rolling through the grass now, smelling floral sweetness mixed with fresh dirt. A ladybug pokes against your nose, bright red, and lets you gently pick it up on your finger. A caterpillar is eating through a leaf the size of your small hand, and you lie flat on your stomach to watch its slow progress. Its small, fat body makes tiny ripples, like the surface of a pond disturbed with a stone. You watch it patiently, like you have all the time in the world. And nothing bad has happened to you.
I get the call at 9:30 in the evening, one of Teddy’s friends. Her voice is pitchy and panicked. I get there twenty minutes later, chest heaving, don’t know where to go, where to look. There’s tape everywhere, streets are blocked off, people are being dragged away in handcuffs, some yelling, some crying. Other people are lying on the ground, motionless. A police officer bumps past me, shouts something in my ear, waves his gun. Teddy’s friend finds me, is pointing the other way and I follow her, tripping over debris, coughing through the haze tasting of chemicals. I see him then, crumpled on the ground, and try to run to him, am held back, hear someone say if I get too close they’ll take me. Close wouldn’t be enough.
He’s lying there, my Teddy, his face a dancing glow of red and blue. His arms are splayed by his sides, adorned with flecks of the broken glass that halos him, sparkling like the surface of a lake in hot summer. His legs are all wrong, twisted up in each other, the skin blooming with bruises. His clothes are dark and damp, and I think I see red, but the light makes it impossible to tell.
From here he is almost unrecognizable, and a part of me sees a stranger in his place. His broad shoulders are sunken, pressed into the ground, and he looks thinner than I remember, lost in the folds of his favourite varsity jacket. He looks so small from here, a dark splotch in the flashing neon lights through the smoke, just another motionless body forgotten in the
street. But his eyes remain his own, opened wide and bottomless brown. His face, once handsome and structured, composed and intelligent, young and resolute, looks sickly, devoid of all his colour. His mouth is pulled downward, his browns turned up. Lying there, his cheek against the hard concrete, motionless and limp, he doesn’t look like my big brother, doesn’t look so fearless. He looks like a boy, small and afraid, pleading for some kind of safety. All at once it hits me: he knew he was going to die. This thought sinks the last of my ships left afloat, and my entire body goes numb.
I dream that Teddy is driving me to the mountains out east, the ones where our parents would always take us as little kids. The windows are down, and the air smells fresh and new. Teddy’s humming along to the radio, a song I recognize but can’t seem to place. I lean my head back against the headrest, and watch as the mountainous green turns over, thundering nearer.
Now we’re sitting on a mossy rock overlooking our old favourite pond, nestled just off one of the hiking trails. The sun sits high above our heads, filtering through the foliage and dappling across our faces. It couldn’t be a more perfect day, but the sharp sting of grief penetrates my serenity. I start to talk but the words mangle with a sob, and Teddy rests his hand on my shoulder while I collect myself. I tell him I don’t know how to do any of this without him, that I don’t even know who I am. He smiles, and starts to talk about the ferns. Tells me to listen.
“No,” he says, “listen. Really listen.” I look him in the eyes, taken aback. I agree. “Do you see those ferns out by the edge of the clearing? Every time it rains they soak it up, with roots as thin as spaghetti.” He gestures to them, his eyes contemplative. “They don’t know how to drink. They just do. Then, the rabbits and deer will eat the leaves, before eventually being eaten themselves by one of the coyotes Dad would always warn us about. And in time, the coyote will die too, and give its body back to the dirt.” I tell him I already know all of this. “Hey, just listen, okay? The dirt and water and rabbits and coyotes may not look like much alone. But they need each other to survive.” He points toward the scenery. “You cannot be an ecosystem. Nobody can. You give, and give, and give, and often, all of your efforts seem to scatter in the wind. But all together?” He smiles. “You get this.” Above, birdsong begins
to trickle over the treetops. He points his finger into my chest. “That’s you. You’re both the water and the plant, the deer and the coyote. You’re the place and the process… the lover, and the love. You are the wormhole, and you are the world.”
I look at his face, warm-blooded, looking back at me with serenity and confidence. I see all the details I must have missed when he was alive, as if gazing through a clearing fog. “Since when did you get so poetic?” I choke, smiling through glassy eyes. He laughs.
“I’m not, I guess. But you are.” We watch the squirrels chase each other through the brush, their chittering echoing off the towering trees above. “What I’m saying is you don’t have to justify your right to be here. The world belongs to you, the future too. But you have to participate, drain the water back to the dirt.”
I pause to consider his words, before leaning my head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry I wasn’t better to you. When it still mattered.”
He turns to me. “You still don’t get it, do you?” He gestures around us. “We’re all of this.”
I frown. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean…” he responds, taking one last look at the forest in all of its splendor, alive with colour and commotion. “There’s still time. You still have time.”
Joan
Victoria Li
Joanne,
I hear that you have found your love. You buried your feet in the sand with her on an island beach. You tossed rocks out to the sea with her and watched them ricochet. You told her she was pretty. Such is the future I prophesied: you with your lover; me in a foreign home.
I met a girl named Joan. Two letters fewer. I think I might fall in love with her. I think I might love her even more than I loved you. Not because you weren’t great enough, but because I have changed. I have become someone who wants to provide for the happiness of others.
Sadly, she, too, has found her love.
Sometimes, when I look up at the city’s skyline and remember its sea-less shores, I still think about you.
If, on a rainy day, fogged September, we run into each other again, in a bubble tea place at home that is not overpriced, will you forgive me?
K.
There are stars in her eyes. I am showing Joan the portable cassette player I inherited from my aunt. She toys with it like it was some meteorite freshly fallen from the sky, eyeing its every crease and crack. You could have it, I say, I have no tapes to load it with. She lits up like the moon in a dark night sky.
1. Ask for Joan’s other name. Ask how to write it in characters.
2. Explain why you don’t like your names. Both of them.
3. Translate “Joan” into characters. A Third Name. Ask Joan if she wants to see it.
4. Tell Joan about an excursion you had with a friend (Joanne) at seventeen.
5. Tell Joan folktales of queer rabbits and the moon.
6. Ask Joan if she believes in reincarnation.
7. Tell Joan she is pretty.
Joan notices my fidgets in an unfamiliar crowd and makes sure I’m listened to. She lingers when someone falls behind tying their shoelaces. Joan answers with your preferences when asked about hers. She keeps her dislikes in the kitchen’s highest cupboard, and hears every eggshell she walks on. She insists you have it when you deny what she offers, in case you, too, tripped more often than walked on unconditional love.
She shines at me like a mirror.
“You are me, but from another world.”
1. Smile when Joan buries her head in your chest.
2. Let Joan run her fingers in your hair.
3. Run your fingers in Joan’s hair the exact same way.
4. Read Joan’s palm. Trace her love-line softly. Note that it is not knotted like yours.
5. Let Joan knead the lobe of your ears. Listen to her breath.
6. Lean on Joan’s heart. Listen to sirens beating in it.
7. Make mental recordings of both.
Joanne and I were building a dwelling on a beach. We filled plastic toy buckets up with sand, dug a hole so deep that seawater leaked into a pond.
I unearthed some shimmering thing. It was an amulet necklace. A white rabbit. Eyes made of ruby. Leaping. Chained to a rose-gold cord. Where is it going?
I stared at the rabbit. It stared back at me.
Under a waxing moon, Joanne tied the necklace around my neck, “It’s yours now.” It was my most precious treasure. Yet I lost it when I first arrived in this city. I suppose I took it off in a college changing room, and never put it back on again.
1. Walk with Joan in the snow. Think about being white-haired together.
2. Stiffen slightly when Joan slips her ungloved hand into your coat pocket.
3. Feel an impetuousness rise up inside you. Ask, Do you not love your girlfriend anymore?
4. Hear, What do you mean? Of course I love my girlfriend.
5. Ask, in your mind, Then what is this. Hold it in your throat. Don’t actually say it.
6. Write Joan a letter. Tear it.
7. Ponder on mailing the letters you wrote to Joanne.
Joanne and I had a ferry to catch. I was having trouble getting sand off my feet in a muddied public changing room. Joanne was counting time out loud when I sprinted full speed to the ticket office. I came back with two tickets in my hand for a ride two hours after. She snatched one from me and scowled, “You would’ve been better picking sand off every inch of the earth.”
I wanted to say, even then, I didn’t think we ever would, truly, be happy together.
In the two hours when we were stranded on that island, Joanne and I sat shoulder-to-shoulder on a bench in silence, as I fought the urge to fidget with the rabbit over and over. Finally, she glanced at me. I looked back. She laid her head on my shoulder, said, “You’re pretty.”
We were seventeen then. I am twenty-one now. I thought I’d have known better how to love myself.
1. Walk into a psychic’s office. Tell her you were in love.
2. Listen to the cards.
3. Two of Cups, the High Priestess. You are grieving because you felt an intensely deep soul connection. You thought they were your twin flame. Why?
4. The Wheel of Fortune, the Three of swords, the Ten of cups. You were lovers in your past life. In your past life, you talked of building a home together. But it did not work out. There was pain. There was heartbreak.
5. Seven of Swords. Yet you moved on. In your past life, you moved on.
You betrayed her.
6. The Moon. She stayed. She stayed for you.
7. Look at the Wheel of Fortune again. This is why, this is why you are holding on to it so badly in this life. You are in debt.
“I have something for you,” Joan says with arms behind her back. It is a necklace with a rabbit amulet. A white rabbit. Eyes made of ruby. Leaping. Chained to a rose-gold cord. “I wonder where it is going.”
I stare at the rabbit. It stares back. I smile and say thank you. This is very sweet of you, I say. I smile. I say thank you.
I have never told Joan about the rabbit necklace found and lost.
Joan blinks, “Guess where I found it.”
I smile again. I’m sure it was somewhere nice. I’m sure you looked around for it. It must have been one of those antique stores lined with floral wallpaper, lit up by chandeliers. One of those places that sell cassette tapes from the 70s. It must have been so nice that I don’t have to know about it.
Joanne—I know now, it was you that the cards talked of. It was you that was my past life. It was the life I left behind. I left you behind. It was you that I betrayed.
I am not in debt. I am running in circles.
1. Joanne is not on her passport, the school name list, or the driver’s licence she will get. It does not belong anywhere. Joanne does not really exist.
2. Joan is on her passport, the school name list, and the driver’s licence she already has. Joan anchors in this world even though it might not belong to her.
3. Under my breath, I whisper A Third Name. A name I gave. I am holding on to a part of Joan that does not belong anywhere, at any time, to anyone.
4. Say, We are ghosts. Always afloat. Always not-here. Always in the inbetweens. Say, That makes us even more gay.
5. The truth: I want to be remembered. I want to be remembered, not the way I could be, but the way I am. I want you to remember me. And when we cross Naihe, when they force the soup down your throat, I want to be one of those memories you die to keep.
6. Tell Joan you love her.
7. Tell Joanne she is pretty.
K.,
You asked if I would forgive you. Precisely, if we run into each other again, on a rainy day, fogged September, in a bubble tea place at home that is not overpriced. Yes. Yes I would. But only if it was a September day. Only if it was raining. Only if it was fogged (fogged, not foggy). Only if it was a bubble tea place. Only if it was not overpriced. Only if we were at home. Only if it was you.
Yes.
Yes, then, I will forgive you.
Joanne
Zo Friedman
Clinging Smoke
Charlotte Lai
CW: Harm
“While, all unchastened, I on Suma Shore still miss sea-tangle pleasures, what of you, O seafolk maid, whose salt fire never burns low?”
— Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Each heave of briny bucket brings seawater closer to the thin trees and the small shelter I’ve built. A splattering trail leads back out to sea, the droplets dark against the dry sand. I have only a woven sheaf, thin stalks of straw shading my eyes, to defend against the sun’s heated pounding.
The fire hisses as the seawater fills the pots. Every day the seafolk boil water on the beaches, collecting the residual salt. My grandmother was seafolk, as was my mother, and so am I; we spend our days waiting by the immense fires, tending the intense heat.
“Hino-san!” A figure far uphill waves, tall and broad-shouldered. The woodcutter’s son scrambles across the sands, arms full of tangled branches. He calls me by my father’s name, voice deepened by blossoming maturity.
“Kobayashi-san,” I respond.
“Here.” He shoves a handful of cherry blossom branches forward. “My uncle visited the capital recently. He said that this was popular with all the young ladies—flowers and beautiful poetry.” The branches are dark, like ink strokes against the parchment tone of the sands. The flowers are soft pink, the colours of youth: young blossoms, flushed cheeks of children, dawn. “I’m only the son of a woodcutter. I can’t offer you pretty words.” I was breathing unevenly, heavily.
Gifting branches of cherry blossoms to the girl with hands caked with salt and mud. These brine-coated fingers, chipped nails and thickened palms, skin toughened by daily labour. Nothing like the porcelain skin and delicate features of the capital ladies. Pretty words, artful calligraphy, scrolls thickened with lines of poetry: these delicacies mean little.
But these flowers, carefully picked, the colours brightened with the season’s vitality, are time and thought and care. “Thank you,” I whisper. “They’re beautiful.”
Months later—months of flowering branches, quiet words; gifts of food, wrapped in small parcels—we’re sitting by the saltwater pots, water boiling, fire roaring. Skewers of brined mackerel lean close to the flames. He’s smiling; fingers intertwining, releasing, tangling again.
His shoulders shift. “Hino, I like you.”
“Oh.”
He likes me. He likes me back.
My hands are cold against my cheeks, even warmed by the fire. He likes me back.
Kobayashi makes a strangled noise, a cut-off exclamation. He babbles nonsense apologies—in embarrassment, I suppose—interrupted by his own sudden coughing.
“Kobayashi-san, are you alright?”
“Please, don’t worry about me.” He sniffles, scrubbing roughly at his eyes. “It’s—it’s only smoke in my eyes. We’re sitting so close to the fire, after all.
Just—” A choked laugh. “Give me a moment, Hino-san.”
He stumbles to his feet, fingers pressed over his eyes, shoulders trembling. The long limbs of a young man catch on the pot stand, the balanced sticks dropping into the fire. The fish are consumed. The pot topples. Shatters. Shards of ceramic scattering across the sand like falling petals. The fire bites and spits, hissing as the boiling saltwater sprays in a wide circle.
“Shit!” he cries out, a foot raised above the steaming earth. “Shit, that hurts.” He’s curling inward, skin reddened, teetering on one foot. Hands dart to his ankle then his cheeks, batting at his eyes.
His grounding foot wobbles, his arms reaching for balance. Still blinded, rubbing smoke from his eyes, he falls backward.
The flames reach for him. I reach, as well.
We tumble into the searing heat.
The world comes alight again with a gasp. Like I had fallen asleep at the beaches and jolted awake, sunlight sudden in the place of shade. Like I hadn’t experienced catching fire, hadn’t held the flames in my outstretched arms. Wind whistles through the branches above. A gull cries.
“Hino-san!” Kobayashi waves from the hilltop, his other arm loaded with branches. He speaks as if we are strangers again, not lovers courting. “Here,” he says, a bundle of flowering cherry blossoms in his fist. “My uncle visited the capital recently. He said that this was popular with all the young ladies— flowers and beautiful poetry.”
“Kobayashi-san?” These are the same words. The same young face, features unmarred by powerful flames.
He ducks his head low, shoulders pulled to his ears. “I’m only the son of a woodcutter. I can’t offer you pretty words.”
“I know, I don’t want pretty words. Why say this again?”
He cocks his head. “Again? We haven’t spoken of this before.”
We had both burned, minutes earlier. Burned to salt and ashes. Yet he is before me now, whole and well, speaking as if we had not spent months courting. This is not a chance to waste; the gods have wound the wheel of time again. Our romance must be fated. I will right all wrongs, returning us to our promised future.
As months pass—months of flowering branches, quiet words; gifts of food, wrapped in small parcels; all exactly as expected—the fated day arrives. Kobayashi leans close, flushed from the fire. His fingers, clutched together, still. “Hino, I like you.”
Finally. Warmth suffuses my core; we’re so close to repairing where we failed. “I like you, too.” I tug his sleeve, drawing him away, stepping forward to stand between him and the fire.
He is quiet, a chill settling over the sands like darkness in the sea.
“Kobayashi?”
His gaze is distant, expression frigid. “No… this was too easy. You were never surprised by anything, were you, Hino-san? Did you plan this, to capture my heart and lead me like a fool?” Fear claws cold in slashes across
my spine. “How many of your smiles were real?” A shove. “Get away from me! I won’t hear another lie from you.”
Dousing water floods my heart, quenching its passion. Heels scramble backward, seeking balance. Heat, licking up the back of my calves—heat, far more scorching than the smothered embers within my ribcage.
The fire, oh so hungry, licks stripes from my skin.
Compared to his cold disdain, the embrace of flames is so, so warm.
Biew Biew SAKULWANNADEE
The sand pressing against my back is a cold shock. Sunlight filters through the thin branches above. Waves mutter, sliding against the shore. I’ve returned to this same cursed moment. Kobayashi will offer me flowers soon, and in accepting I will doom us to continuing this cyclical torture.
I reject him. Months pass in numbing repetition: lonesome meals by the fires, hands empty but for water pails and pottery. It is to prevent his unhappiness, I remind myself. This time, it will be different.
One evening, a fire is still lit by the shoreline, a bright spark on the deep purples of the sands. Drawing closer to the fire, the silhouettes of two figures come into focus.
Kobayashi and another village girl are standing close to each other. Improperly close. She holds a branch of flowers to her chest. Her fingers, thin, calloused lightly by loom work. His fingers tangle in her hair, palm to her cheek.
Burning.
A great, incandescent rage, the burning a crippling pain through each limb, radiating outward. He would find happiness without me? Impossible! The gods had—the gods had promised—
The sand sways beneath me, knees buckling, heels sinking. Mouth opens, closes, opens. Shouts of protest swallowed. Kobayashi never would have loved me. His affections were never true—each repetition a mocking revelation. Perhaps this whole performance has been for naught.
“You traitor!” He will not remember me, so I shout with abandon. This precious love I held, this wicked blaze.
The flames welcome me greedily.
Gulls cry, waves murmur, and the wind sings sorrowfully through the thin trees. Again, I return to lie upon the sand, chest aching with a rapid pulse. This time, I douse the fire immediately. It will do no good to have him know of my presence.
Instead of the open beaches, I move my pot and fire within my home. I have battened shut the doors, hung straw mats across the windows. I cannot let him find any traces of smoke. I cannot let him find me.
Kobayashi-san, won’t you ask me, “What is it like, the pain of an unwilling parting at dawn?” I wish for it; I wish for it so desperately, for you
to hold my hands within your own and ask about the scorch marks in my lungs, the ashes piled in my heart.
But our lives have intertwined, and I cannot bear to harm him again.
I fan myself with tepid air, movements sluggish in the stifling heat. The temperature is only discomfort, not pain, like the biting within my chest. Grief has plunged its fangs deep within my breast, piercing my fluttering lungs. It is only discomfort.
Another slow breath, throat aching. Just mere discomfort.
The air is bitter, heavy.
There is a battering at the door. The frame rattles, a muffled shifting.
A stuttered breath. The room is darkening, a looming greyness. I will rest a moment.
Only a moment.
The fire’s glow grows dark.
Bear
Nghi Nguyen
CW: Suicide
“Bear, make me comfortable in the world at last.”
—
Marian Engel, Bear
So we made it to Bumfuck-Nowhere, Ontario. It was Sasha’s idea. We’ll see the northern lights by the weekend.
He said, “Let’s go off-grid too.” Cosplay some hippies, why not. There’s no internet in this AirBnB. It’ll just be us and Mother Earth.
“This is how I know you’ve turned into a real man,” I said. “You have no fear.”
I take a picture of the cabin and text my parents to let them know we survived the road trip. I pull my hood over my head, take a deep breath. My first exhale outside makes a cloud and I wonder how I ever got here. My ass was never made for this weather. From the trunk, I bring out a sack of rice, a rice cooker, and bear spray. Sasha carries out a chestful of firewood, as if my city boy knows anything about camping.
At night I toss and turn. The wind hisses through the windows as a snowstorm rages. It’s one of those nights where Miriam’s laughter still rings in my ear. I miss her smile.
Sasha reaches over and strokes the inside of my thigh, whispering my name. “You cold, baby?” he asks and I’m not really but I want him to make me
warmer. Hot. Take me back to the sticky air of my motherland. No one understands why I love heat waves, no one but Sasha.
I guide his hand to my cock, urge him to hold me until I’m ready.
Then I watch him unclothe until he is naked but for the gold chain around his neck.
He lays down and kneeling between his legs I drag my tongue across the land that is his body. I taste all the landmarks: his top surgery scars, then his nipples. Gently, I move Christ aside so I can kiss his collarbones.
I am an immigrant on Sasha’s country but I feel indigenous here. He is the only place I’ve ever been at home.
“I love you I love you I love you,” I say in between kisses. I spread apart his legs so I can lick his clit. I work him until he is throbbing and ripe as fruit, his cunt a well from which water was plentiful.
And I am feral from thirst, so I let the wilderness out from within me. I make him gasp.
Sasha and I met in a Catholic high school when he was still a lesbian and I— people knew something was off
We went to the same university and both had immigrant parents to please. I studied computer engineering and he did biochemistry. We hooked up after the first calculus tutorial. I was 18 in my freshman year and hungry for skin; I would have agreed to sleep with anyone, anywhere. But I was damn lucky I did it with Sasha.
We dated after that hook-up. I discovered that the space I occupied was more capacious than “gay.”
After college, we got good jobs, moved in together as soon as we could in the outskirts of Toronto. We started our transitions around the same time, in our late twenties. Now we’re married, Sasha got top surgery, and we’re vacationing to celebrate his chest being finally healed.
Those were the motions, the sequence of events.
But how the hell we got here, I still don’t believe.
How I never had to run away from home.
Despite the arguments that tore up my throat and trying to disappear. The anxiety attacks late at night in the ER waiting room.
I didn’t know trans, queer, disabled, immigrant freaks could be happy.
I thought I’d be dead by thirty, overdosed on something, or swaying in the forest like a wind chime. Like what happened to Miriam. Because how could you have so many marginalizations and still be worthy of life.
I see Narnia in the morning. The snow reaches my knees and I wade more so than walk.
Neon rope guides the path down to the lake, and it seems like every two metres there is a yellow warning sign flashing “STAY ON THE TRAIL.”
If you start walking off the path, you might find that wilderness greatly outnumbers civilization. Do not forget this is Canada.
Sasha wants to take a polar bear plunge, because it’s on his list of things he’s only ever seen white people do. “I don’t want to be white,” Sasha said, when I laughed at him for bringing home placemats, as if we had ever once set the table with a knife and fork. “Or straight or normal. But I’d kill to have what they have sometimes. A lot of the time. You ever feel like that?”
“Everyday,” I answered, and now I am eating the consequences of my words: underneath my down jacket is a pink bikini.
It’s negative five degrees. The lake has the texture of a slushie. We take off our outer clothes and, hand-in-hand, let the cold water take our breath away. I understand the attractiveness of this self-torture now. Everything stops. Your heartbeat drums in your ears and you are reminded of how mortal you are, how your flesh holds together your everything.
I tolerate the moment of transcendence for ten seconds before running back to shore and swathing myself in a towel. I sit on the ground, shivering, laughing as I shout, “I can’t believe you convinced me to do something so
stupid!” Sasha joins me after a minute, clattering his teeth. We huddle under a towel like penguins. Sasha cups my breast and circles my nipple that’s gone hard from the cold. He nuzzles my ear and whispers, “I’m kind of glad I made you look this sexy though.”
“Bastard,” I say, and push his head down to my waist. I close my eyes in ecstasy. When I open them, there is a white bear before us, a mere five metres away. “Babe,” I say, “we’re too down south to have polar bears, right?”
Sasha wipes his mouth, turns his head. “That’s a spirit bear.”
The bear’s steps are silent on the snow. It charges at us too fast for me to either think or panic.
My muscles move on their own. I’m bigger and stronger than Sasha, so I throw him down and shield his body with mine. So this is how I die, I laugh, internally, butt-naked, mauled to death by a bear. Did not give Mother Earth the respect She deserved.
But the spirit bear does not hurt me. It butts its muzzle against the back of my thigh. It huffs and licks the semen that Sasha had beckoned out of me. In response to the bear’s slick tongue, I can only grunt inarticulately.
And then I laugh. I whisper into Sasha’s ear what this animal is doing to me. His poor heart is hammering against mine, and as I tell him, his muscles loosen. He giggles a bit too.
The bear tastes, but never eats.
It rubs its fat, alabaster flank against my side, Sasha’s too, then pads away. In a blink, the bear becomes one with the white forest. Sasha hugs me for a long time, holding onto my breakable body, checking if my heart still beats and my blood still flows.
I assure him both do. I walk back into the freezing lake, to wash the bear’s stickiness off my legs. Somehow, this time I am no longer cold. The bear had warmed me.
Zo Friedman
Later that day, we got a text from the AirBnb host that local park rangers have located two young bears near the cabin, one of which is a rare white variant of the species. We should stay indoors at night time, the host wrote, and he reminded us to be meticulous with our trash disposal. Normally at that time of year, bears would be hibernating, but climate change had royally fucked up Mother Earth, and really, if we get ravaged by a bear, was She the one who picked the fight?
I keep thinking of that spirit bear, long after the hues of the northern lights fade from my memory. I Google about it and find out that spirit bears are sacred to some Indigenous cultures. Sasha thinks it was a sign from God. Only by miracle could the bear have come so close to us, and chose to love instead of hurt.
It was a bear. Apex predator. Simply its name was deserving of my reverence and adoration.
Thank you for being so gentle with my body, bear, with so little hesitation it scared the life out of me. I like to think you would have always chosen love.
You were a miracle and I won’t deliberate too much on who begot you. I did not believe in miraculous things because of their unpredictability. You can not rely on them for salvation. You can’t. But now I know: miracles simply happen and you are left blinking, hazy-eyed in their wake.
Oh, Miriam.
Miriam who I pray for. Miriam head boy of school. Miriam addicted to stages and limelight; you performed in every musical, every concert, every open mic. Miriam almost 22 when the cops called me because you didn’t have any other number on your phone. Miriam I cry for when I put on makeup, or give Sasha a kiss, or buy baby socks, or do anything a girl like you always deserved to do. Who I will always cry for.
Miriam who after death, I finally understood why people believe in Heaven because how else are you supposed to ease an agony that’s not in your body, but soul.
Darling, I’m so sorry to have so many miracles, to live in one without you by
my side.
You were how I should have ended. A story whispered, never with enough shame or rage. The wrong name on the tombstone.
Life is so unpredictable, only death is certain. Suicide even more so. Love is fleeting. Hate as solid and deep as bedrock. I had so little faith.
I wake up on Miriam’s death anniversary with Sasha half-thrown off the bed. This is how my beloved sleeps: on his stomach with his arm and leg hanging off, prone, like he’s never heard of monsters. I lift his shirt and run my fingers along the small of his back. I say his name and he makes those sleepy noises I adore. “Baby,” I say, “there’s enough room here. You’re going to fall off.”
By the waist, I pull him closer into me, so I can breathe in the scent of his scalp. We snuggle like that for an hour. “I love you,” I say and kiss his temple before I get up. I brush my teeth and in the mirror, some of my frizzy hair is streaked in silver. I’m still having trouble getting used to it. I have never imagined my hair in that colour. I make us both coffee, put Sasha’s oversugared, over-milked, just-the-way-he-likes-it latte on the nightstand. I put on a blazer but stay in my pajama pants, walk into my home office. There’s a rosary hanging off the corner of my monitor. Sasha strung it there to bless my work, even though he doesn’t think Jesus knows how to code. “But He gives you strength and courage,” Sasha said, “when no one else is there. That’s a better skill than Python.” Atop my PC tower is a bear sculpture made of white jade. Sasha gave me that too, for my 40th birthday. The weather is drab and the light that flows into the room is feeble. I log in, watch the loading icon spin round and round, then look away because it’s taking too long. A finch at the window. A grey squirrel looting the birdfeeder.
My little life, a miracle that’s also a vow, with premature death being a promise broken.
The bear had come to tell me that I am wanted, not merely on, but by this earth, thus I belong here. I have always belonged.
For Ghost, and every trans sibling I have and ever will have.
goûter de mille-pattes
Ella MacCormack
CW: Insectophobia
A bug crawling on you doesn’t feel nearly as bad as you wish it would. A piece of fluff, hair blowing in the wind, those twitches and shudders your brain makes up, a silverfish: all identical in feeling. No, you want it to hurt.
My apartment smells of mildew, earth, and desperation. I haven’t even gone through the trouble of decorating it past the necessities, just more places for bugs to hide. The nightstands are derelict. On the first night in the room, I saw a spider crawl out from under one, swiftly declaring it the bugs’ territory to be left alone. Same went for the closet, crawlspace, and small window ledge near the ceiling of the basement room. The only space explicitly mine is the bed. Because of this drawing of boundaries, I always duck my head while walking through door frames and the particularly low-ceiling hallway. When people come over, I decided that I wouldn’t put on a brave face. If that were to happen again. It’s been longer than I care to admit. I often think about others coming over, exactly what’d they think and say about my nondescript room. The bugs would probably not approve, but quietly skulk in the bed stand and closet until the interlopers left.
When you enter a room filled with bugs and live in it as I have to, you create rules. Rules for yourself, rules for the bugs. They will respect you so long as you respect them. The floor moves when you look too closely. So you don’t. The silverfish are the exact colour of the dull tile that lines the floor, grey with specks of white. Don’t look at them as they dart across. They don’t like it. For the most part, the cellar spiders and I are on the same side, so I leave them alone. And not insignificantly, I haven’t quite figured out how to kill them in the top corners of the room.
I prepare myself for my walk. Every time the folding door to my room opens, the web in the corner shakes and threatens to buck its spider off, but it always holds on. I imagine it glaring up at me with every entrance and exit. I sometimes whisper an apology. I pat down my pockets, ensuring everything shoved in there made it, and off I go.
The streets are more crowded than I’d anticipated. I’m weaving between people, more aware of my posture than I’d like to be. I keep my head low, not raising my gaze much above the sidewalk line. Despite all this, I still spot her, just a block ahead of me. Karina. Maybe we are going to just walk past each other—are we at this point now? Just two people who are passing by. No, she sees me. Her headphones have come fully off. We are having a conversation, whether we like it or not now. We begin to exchange pleasantries, standing in silence after each simple “How are you,” “What are you up to now,” unsure exactly what to say. Pedestrians navigate around us, like we are a rock in the way of flowing water. Eventually, she asks what she has been meaning to.
“You still down in that room?” She looks at me carefully, as if the mere mention of the room alone will make me break out in hives.
“Look, I’ve really got a handle on it these days.” I say, breaking eye contact. There’s a mayfly on her arm she hasn’t noticed yet. A glance back up at her. She doesn’t believe me; her eyebrows are still furrowed in that way.
“Okay,” she says, her lips tight, nodding cautiously. “At least go buy some ant traps.” She touches my shoulder before walking off again. I shudder.
I take off my jacket. Centipedes shed their skin, with each molting gaining more legs. I untie my shoes, avoiding looking at the tile as much as I can. The more legs a centipede has, the longer it has lived, which can be up to seven years.
I shut the folding door; the hinges trying to keep up with my hand, squeaking the entire way through. I sneak a look at the spider web between the door and the wall. The web shakes, and yet there is no spider. In this corner, there are those ants who found the gap left between the door frame and the wall—likely why the spider built its web here. Usually they come out with the light, but again, empty.
My room, otherwise bursting with life, is asleep. The tile is motionless. The corners are vacant. The walls are quiet. I begin my search.
I’m not actually hoping to find them, I tell myself. This is what I wanted;
I can get along with my life now. I open drawers, pull books out from the shelf, shine lights on the little holes along the wallpaper. Each bug not found forces me to pick up the pace. They wouldn’t do this to me. I flip the mattress, the sheets strewn on the floor. I must’ve done something wrong to them. I’m crawling around the room, searching under furniture. My eyes well up as I collapse on the floor in defeat. I am alone.
Elaine Xiao
There. In the corner. I can only see it from this angle on the floor, a centipede. It glides toward me, closer than I have ever allowed a centipede before, before gently climbing on my hand. The centipede’s pace, strange and melodic, swaying up my arm, soft as ever. Its legs, all thirty of them, roll together as a wave, rippling, propelling itself up my arm. I meet the centipede with acceptance. Just earlier today, I found it hard to tell which end of a centipede was forward. I was blind. Two black eyes meet mine, unblinking. We share this moment together, the centipede lingering over where Karina touched not an hour ago, its antennas tenderly dragging a path along my skin.
I pick up the bug, pressing with as little pressure I can muster. It provides no resistance. Antennas and all, it is just a bit shorter than my pointer finger. Hungered, I part my lips. The pincers of the centipede crack between my teeth, immediately bitter on my tongue—an apéritif of still-wriggling legs. Its venom, no longer needed in death, seeps into my mouth, numbing anything within reach. As it departs, the aftertaste is rich and acrid. My mouth misses its presence immediately.
My senses return to me. Gaining my bearings in this mess of a room, I begin eyeing my next meal.
Metaphysical Pepto
Zo Friedman
CW: Vomit, death
In the fashion of a mathematician’s wet dream and yet so ordinarily, standing perpendicularly to the road, she formed a perfect right-angle triangle with it and marked the hypotenuse with saliva. This was a habit, just as it was an intimate reaction to the memory of her father.
Unfortunately, this particular street had suffered the brunt of this maltreatment and finally concluded that it would present this problem at their next Road’s Anonymous meeting. The discussion went as such:
Road One: “Dude, this chick won’t stop spitting on me.”
Road Two: “They’re drilling holes into me. Get over it man.”
Then the conversation fizzled out into incoherent yelling, inevitable when you gather hundreds of auditorily dysregulated streets.
Over the years, if one had collected her spit into a fish tank, it would be halffilled. This was disturbing to consider—entirely irrelevant to most—and bad enough to make God gag. When God made heaven and hell, he had failed to consider that humans could just be disgusting, as an alternative to bad and good. This was likely because he spent the first six days accomplishing everything ever, and then three hundred years developing an area of hell dedicated to politicians who started in good faith and were corrupted, with a corresponding wall for politicians who started in bad faith and succeeded. Then he took a well-deserved break, where instead of curling up with an IKEA manual, he was forced to deal with nausea resulting from the presence of the not-bad-enough-for-hell humans, residing in heaven. God, having had what felt like an eternity of morning
sickness, (unlike that from even before labouring the world from nothing), filled heaven with dogs, and placed humans in his afterthought—The Purgatory.
This arrangement was not so bad for the humans anyway; they had learnt that speaking to God was about as incoherent as hundreds of roads talking at once. And there was the most inevitable disappointment of meeting the idol that all their idols took after.
On the day she died the street might have celebrated had someone else not taken her place—and spat on them that very morning.
In her new purgatorial abode, she was placed about six kilometres and two floors up from the corresponding politician hell walls, near where her father resided.
At the time God designed the purgatory he had a particular fascination with interior design, and couldn’t quite decide which wallpaper suited the individual cells best. After a millennia of trying he was too tired to remove the wallpaper, and though the rooms were now much smaller than they started, he surmised that he would conclude what the purgatory would be like functionally when the paper was removed completely from the walls, in the first room, on the first floor, by the first inhabitant. And so commenced an evocative peeling existence, till then.
It was at some point, when she was on the fiftieth layer of ornate wallpaper, that the first inhabitant completed their term. God scrambled to decide what to do with the purgatory given the completion, and amid the chaos, the fish tank was emptied.
Mio Sugiura
Create-a-Sim
Audrey Lai
I had a sticker on my brand new work laptop that said “New York Or Nowhere,” meaning I was “Nowhere” and now I was “Somewhere,” but I would always be from “Nowhere.”
I finally landed an internship this summer, freshly graduated with a degree in economics and a minor in journalism, which is kind of like telling the entire world that you couldn’t commit to what you really wanted to do, and you also couldn’t let it go. It’s like having carry-on you aren’t willing to pay the extra money to check, and so you open your luggage in front of the TSA agents and pull things out, like an extra bottle of contact solution, or your travel toothpaste. Then you’re taking out an umbrella, your Nikon camera, the seashell your best friend found on the beach. You board the plane and months later you get a feeling that something’s missing, but you’ve forgotten what it was.
Counting me, there were five interns at the magazine, but we never saw each other during work. We were all in different divisions, with me in finance, Connor in marketing, Maya in publicity, Liam in sales, and Jess in editorial. The closest we got to “bonding with our cohort,” as Helen the internship coordinator had said, was our weekly Zoom intern meetings, where we did an icebreaker and discussed our weekly progress. I think that requiring an icebreaker in each meeting probably meant that the icepick wasn’t strong enough, or more likely that we were stranded in a remote village in Greenland.
“It wasn’t my initial choice, but I’m loving the work we’re doing,” Liam said during our last meeting. “Really important stuff, seeing how to best distribute the magazines we have here to the market, getting to channel my energy to make an impact on readers out there.”
Of course I didn’t believe him. It was all corporate talk. Everyone wanted to be in editorial.
Jess Fischer
hi!! i’m having the most boring day how are u? trying to get to know everyone here yknow
I glanced at the Slack notification, my eyes focusing on Jess’ profile picture. I hadn’t ever seen her face so clearly before, since her camera on Zoom was blurry and pixelated. I decided to send a message back, hitting send a couple minutes after I had already typed it.
Lily C.
Working on a spreadsheet rn lol. Aren’t you working on the indie band profile tho? Sounds interesting!
Jess replied almost immediately.
Jess Fischer
yesss how’d u know? i ’m in the middle of typing up notes from the interviews it’s cool but i kinda just want to go home and chill
I had listened to her talk about the profile during our weekly meeting, imagining myself sitting face to face with real musicians in Electric Lady Studios and my own name in the corner of a glossy centerfold spread.
“Look,” I would say at the grocery store checkout line, pointing at the magazine next to Us Weekly and People. “I wrote something in this one.”
Lily C.
Good luck on it – I’ll def read it when it comes out!
Jess Fischer
OMFG my boss is here now helpppp
i’ll see u later tho! maybe we can grab coffee before work sometime or something??
Lily C.
For
sure!
I closed Slack and opened an incognito tab, searching for a “Jess Fischer” on LinkedIn. I found her on the second page of searches. She had gone to NYU Tisch for undergrad and was the photography editor for the school paper. She was currently working at the Reformation on Madison in the Upper East Side. She went to high school near Minneapolis and she did show choir, winning states her senior year. She won third runner-up in the Minnesota state poetry competition for teens for a poem called “carry me out / gently then / fraternal twin / as fast as you can.”
On Sunday, I booted up the PC in my bedroom, the familiar whirrr of the computer fan starting up again. The thick spines of my SAT and AP prep books lined the shelves of my desk. It had been a long time since I had last played the Sims—the summer after high school, when I worked part-time and drove around town in my mom’s Toyota. Those summer nights, I stayed on the game late into the night, completing legacy challenges and recreating my childhood home in build mode, my bedroom pitch black except for the blue light reflecting onto my profile.
I created a new save file and entered Create-A-Sim. I carefully sculpted Jess’ face, remembering how difficult it was to make an exact replica of someone using a cursor. I took a pottery elective in college, and I loved the damp, earthy smell of the clay on my fingers, the pot spinning so fast it looked almost static. It was easy to lose control of what you were making, for it to slip under your grasp and have it all be ruined. I wished I could reach through the screen myself, to rub my fingers in her cheekbones and brush against her lips. The face reflecting back to mine didn’t look quite right.
I opened Instagram, plucking her @ out of a lineup of other Jess Fischers. Under the blue “follow” button was a lock. Still though, I could open her profile picture, dragging it until it took up half of the screen. I started working on Sim Jess Fischer again, realizing how I had messed up some of the proportions. I felt a sort of uneasiness in that moment, with her face blown up on my screen. All things considered, it was really the same thing as drawing a portrait from a reference—it was just that seeing her real face on the computer, pixelated
because of how large it was, how large I made it, brought me back outside the screen, like I had turned real again after only being an apparition of myself. But I had finished. Sim Jess Fischer—she looked just like the girl in the picture. #
I played the Sims every day when I got back to my parent’s house from work that week. When I wasn’t playing The Sims at home, I was shopping for Sim Jess, browsing the #ts4cc tag on Tumblr during work. It started with finding a floral dress similar to the one she had in the grad photo in her LinkedIn headshot, but I found myself wondering if she was the type of person to buy coffee table books, if she would wear strawberry slippers with her pajamas.
When you were controlling a Sim, a “plumbob,” a bright green crystal, hovered over their head. If the plumbob was there, you could click on stuff and ask your Sim to do things, like make a grilled cheese for lunch or WooHoo with other Sims or prank a Sim with a hand buzzer. After making these commands, they would fall into the action queue and your Sim would obey them one by one, like a worker at a conveyor belt.
Sometimes, though, your Sim would try to do things on its own, or even override your actions, like a bad dog. It was aggravating when your Sim didn’t do what it had been told. Sim Jess tried to fix a broken computer herself when it was much easier to just buy a new one, and she was always trying to flirt with an ugly townie Sim. I clicked “X” on the rogue actions as they appeared, but they just kept popping up. I slammed my desk with my palms, too hard, and the screen of my monitor began to flicker.
“Shit!” I said. “Shit shit shit.” I checked the braids of tangled cords behind the console and just decided to just turn the computer off and power it back on.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said as the screen blinked back at me. It was fine, my save files were fine, Sim Jess was fine.
Over the course of the week, I guided Sim Jess to complete her Bestselling Author aspiration. I made Sim Jess Fischer level up her writing skills and do her work tasks and publish her books. On Thursday night, she had completed her aspiration. I hovered my cursor over the new trait she gained: Poetic Sims can capture life itself in a book, and wield it to bring back someone they’ve lost.
It was a Friday night when I went out for dinner with the other interns at the company. Jess sent me a private message on Slack: me and the other interns are thinking of hanging out tn if ur down! :) I usually headed to Penn Station straight from work, boarding NJ Transit so I could get to my parent’s house by midnight, but that night I texted my dad that I would be crashing on my friend’s couch and he didn’t need to bother with picking me up.
Good, he wrote back. Making connections is good.
The restaurant was a seedy kind of place, probably chosen by the group because the internship paid only a dollar over minimum wage. More than double than you could make here, though, my friend from Notre Dame gleefully said when I told her the news. It was true—the eight dollars per hour I made at the university music room was like chump change. I missed Indiana, though—the flatness, riding in my friend’s Subaru on the highway and seeing those open fields. It was as if the large expanse of sky enveloped me, as if the world could swallow me up whole. In New York, it’s like sardines in a can. Looking up at the sky was stupid: it would get you nowhere.
Real Jess Fischer was in a booth across from Liam, animatedly chatting about the profile on an indie band she was working on. Had they walked to the restaurant together?
“Hi,” I said, clearing my throat. “Jess, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” she replied, a smile sweeping her mouth. She had a mole near the right side of her lip, which must’ve been smoothed out with FaceApp from the pictures she had online. I made a mental note to update her Sim when I got home. She scooted further into the booth, patting the seat next to her. I sat down, my eyes still focused on her face. Pores dotted her nose like the seeds of a strawberry, so unlike the silken skin of a Sim. I could almost reach out and touch her, but it was like there was an invisible barrier between us. She bit into a fry and chewed. “You’re—don’t tell me—” she said somewhat playfully.
“Starts with a L,” I said sheepishly, giggling a little bit, suddenly conscious of the tempo of it and how the pitch oscillated up and down.
Real Jess leaned over, gingerly placing her chin on the back of her hand like The Thinker.
“Hmm,” she mused thoughtfully, her knee brushing close to mine. “L… Liza… Luna… Lucy…”
“Lily,” I said.
“Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” Liam sang, a tinge off-key. “Lucy in the sky with diamonds !” Real Jess sang, joining in.
I imagined what I’d do if I was on my computer, if I’d make her swim in a pool and delete the ladder, leaving her to drown, or if I’d feed her to a hungry Cowplant, or if I’d force her to pee her pants in front of everyone until she died of embarrassment. I looked above Real Jess’ head, imagining a green plumbob spiraling like a toy spinning top, turning, turning, turning.
When I got back home three hours later, groggy from the long train ride, I headed straight to my bedroom and booted up Sims on my PC. My cursor hovered over delete on Jess’ save file.
Are you sure?
I clicked yes, Sim Jess’ ones and zeros disappearing into the ether.
Ayesha Siddiqui
CW: Racism
There is a simple way to float.
Sunlight plays on the surface of the water, reflecting a cluster of what looks like diamonds on liquid glass. I catch sight of my reflection in between the soft ripples of cerulean that occur at equal enough intervals as if to remind me of their artificiality. In the reflection, my hair is flat and stringy. The ripples give it a jagged look, as well as distorting my body, leaving much room for speculation, and little for certainty. I wonder what I would look like if someone were to photograph me climbing out of this pool, hair sleek, combed, and dripping; lips plump and pink, parted ever so slightly and revealing just enough teeth as if taken by indifferent surprise; eyes narrowed and knowing, lightly suggestive and harshly smouldering.
I’m interrupted from my daydream by a sudden rustle of a bird flapping its wings overhead. I catch sight of my reflection again, of my short legs emerging from my one-piece swimsuit. I decide that I would rather not know. I take a deep breath and sink into the water.
Every Sunday, it was the same ritual. The house would come alive, bustling with activity unusual for a day of the week that was so often characterized by snoozed alarm clocks, the blurred space between morning and afternoon, and ennui. But Sunday mornings in our household were their own affair. Sunday mornings were pool days.
It often felt like the days leading up to it were spent in its anticipation. In
a few years, we would begin formal swimming lessons, to which my mother would take us after school when our envious longing to be one of the kids who traversed the deep end grew inconsolable; the kids whose toes leapt off the ground and stayed there, enveloped by ripples of water that seemed almost alive in their effort to keep them afloat.
Unsurprisingly, those lessons quickly grew tedious and tiresome. My memories of those days instead became characterized less by the lessons themselves, and more by the after-school lunches my mother would pack for us to eat in the car on the way there. These lunches were a big deal, and were probably the bait needed to convince the preteen children we were to continue attending, week after week. For ease and convenience, my mother brought us the most car-friendly lunches: sandwiches. For my siblings and I, sandwiches were enjoyed as a luxurious treat that broke the mundanity of our usual rotation of salan and roti at home. It was every child’s dream: biting into the soft, white cloud of a bun, tongue teasing the surface of breaded chicken, fried to crisp perfection before teeth pierced through the flesh, feeling the cacophony of spices and melted sliced cheese overtake your taste buds. Entering the car with an excited What’s for lunch?, we were already furiously tearing down the wrapping engraved with a handwritten label reading, “Mum’s Burgers” before waiting for an answer. On our very first swimming lesson, I remarked on the packaging with an exclamation of fondness. In my hurry, I carelessly threw it in the trash when I was done eating, only to later be struck by a pang of grief at the loss of the carefully written letters in my mother’s handwriting—a grief that was only accentuated when my mother later carelessly asked, Oh, you threw it away?
There were other things. For instance, the revelation that curly hair did not stay curly in water. While painstakingly obvious, I still think of a friend I made during these lessons whose name I do not remember. What I do remember, however, is the visceral shock I experienced when seeing her emerge in sight as my car drove away after an evening lesson: dressed in yellow jeans and a printed floral top, hair dried, lustrous, and voluminous— and decadently curly. I was overcome by a certain unease. The transition from picturing her as a straight, slicked-back hair owner to one with curls created a sort of dissonance in my mind; every subsequent thought of her now required a deliberate effort on my part to draw on a mane of curls that delicately
framed her face. It was as simple as this. She was a curly-haired person when I had known her to be a straight-haired one. Perhaps it was my first time realizing the potential of water to conceal. I wondered about the limitations of water, and if you could really be known inside of it.
Eventually, I did learn to swim. Very well too, actually. But before the days of swimming lessons, there were just Sundays.
Naomi Marcus
There is something notable about my and my siblings’ unwavering fascination with swimming pools before any of us knew how to swim. Week after week, we’d find ourselves awake early, priding ourselves on our burgeoning ability to pack a swimming bag all by ourselves. In went my orange towel robe, which was fraying at the edges and now stopped just below my knees, but reminded me of the numerous fictional characters who owned a robe of sorts, and began to contain an element of mysticism around it. I thought that owning such a storybookish garment was an essential step in finding myself enveloped in a story of my very own. Next came the bottles: shampoo and conditioner, but if in a rush, only the shampoo was really necessary. Complete with goggles, a swimming cap, a hairbrush, and an extra pair of underwear, I was ready. Wearing our swimsuits underneath our clothes, my siblings and I skipped down the stairs in our flip-flops to find our father. ◊
When I was younger, I always wanted one of those inflatable floats that other kids had. The ones shaped like donuts or flamingoes or ducks. My father told us that there was a trick where we could float without any of those extra steps. I still remember him, with his arms spread out before him as he fell backward into the blanket of water, trusting it to carry him. His legs rose to meet him and he would go limp, his body a big brown X in the water. He would stop talking once he was in this position and instead stare unblinkingly at the expanse above him: watery, white-hot blue in the early noon sun, threads of light spooling out between sparsely placed clouds. He could have been a mannequin, if not for his periodic blinking. I used to think that the silence was a necessary component of floating. That my words would somehow weigh me down. Then my father would abruptly stand back up, disturbing the smoothness of the sheet of water. He’d squeeze the water out of his thinning hair, rub his eyes, and smile at us, as if waking up from a dream. He’d ask if we wanted to try it and we eagerly clamoured to go first. It always went the same way. I’d stretch out my arms, mimicking the shape of wings, and let myself fall back as my father held my legs up. I wouldn’t always notice when he let go, but I would know when I felt a warm pool of
water encircle my waist and I’d stand up before my feet touched the ground, gasping and spluttering preemptively. My father would laugh, telling me that floating came with practice. There was a trick, he said, and it was to stop thinking about it. To become lighter than air, you need to trick the water into thinking that you are not there. After a few more failed attempts, my father nodded reassuringly, saying that I was already getting better. Then he’d ask us how we felt about a lunch of naan pizza, a delicacy at the sports club we were at. We’ll need to get it before the crows do, he said, and we were racing out of the pool, giggling, before you could say float.
Her name was Arabella; Bella, for short, and we were fourteen. It was my first day at a new school in a new country. Bella was an excellent swimmer and was assigned to be my swimming partner after my attempts to lock eyes with familiar faces from earlier in the day had yielded nothing but averted gazes and pitying glances, tightened grips on each other’s hands as if afraid I would try to pry them apart and take them away. Mrs. Stewart, our PE teacher, found me standing in the midst of this commotion, back slouched, a hand wrapped around my waist, clutching my other arm. She called for Bella to come over and introduced us to each other, emphasizing Bella’s talent as reason for her to take good care of me. All toothy smiles and beams that didn’t reach her eyes, she bounced off with her whistle around her neck, attending to another group of girls huddled in a corner.
I smiled tentatively, uttering an almost unintelligible Hi under my breath. Bella stared at me. Her eyes were blue and unbothered with an almost metallic tint to them, a stark contrast to the gentle teal of the swimming pool. I wondered if she’d heard me, and had just opened my mouth to ask her how long she’d been swimming for when her cheeks rose and she broke out into a frenzy of giggles. I felt my own cheeks grow hot, thinking she was laughing at the sight of my knee-length, zip-up swimsuit, unruly strands of hair escaping my too-small cap. Bella was tall and tan; not tan in the way that I was, but in the way of ancient gold and sand dunes. Even the hair on her arms was a dainty brass, left soft and untouched. I gripped my hand tighter around my arm, budding black bristles from where I’d shaved poking into the crook of my palm. Bella was now gesticulating wildly, and it was then that I turned
around and realized that she hadn’t been looking at me at all and was instead looking at a girl standing behind me. Somehow, this made my cheeks feel even hotter.
I recognized Jennifer from orientation last week. She was new too, and had just moved here from Canada. Jennifer was not like Bella, but she was fair and rosy-cheeked, even if not taller than me. I wondered how she and Bella were already friends. At that moment, Mrs. Stewart’s whistle pierced the air and in her megaphone, she called for us to line up around one edge of the pool to get ready for our first activity: the five-minute swim. This was literally five minutes of continuous swimming while our partners counted the number of laps we could complete in that time.
My stomach felt queasy. It had been at least two years since I had really swam, and my old swimming lessons felt like a distant past. Mrs. Stewart’s whistle pierced the air for a second time. The last thing I saw before plunging into the water was Bella sitting by the ledge at the opposite end of the pool, toes dipped in the surface. She seemed to be looking at me again, but this time I wasn’t too sure. Her eyes wore the same vacant, blank expression, as if she saw nothing more than the wall behind me.
I felt like I was crawling through molasses. The water felt different than I’d remembered. I splashed around frantically, kicking my legs, trying to propel myself forward. I was horribly mistiming my breaths, and frequently ended up with a mouthful of water instead. My lungs felt like they were burning, and the water felt sharp, needle-like, instead of pleasant and blanket-like, the way I had known it to be. I reached the other end, with hardly a sense of where I was, and somewhere around the third lap I gasped; a sharp, pained sound. I feebly crawled out the edge of the pool—my edge, not Bella’s—and sat huddled with my knees pulled into my chest. I was still gasping and coughing when Mrs. Stewart came running up to me, asking what was wrong. I can’t swim anymore, I panted.
She looked at me with a semblance of pity. Did you get a cramp? she asked. The spectacle I’d caused was garnering attention and I looked around to see girls staring curiously in my direction and talking in hushed voices, hands cupped around their mouths. Yes, I lied.
Later, near the end of the lesson, I found myself seated next to Bella again. We’d completed our capsizing activity—with more gasping—and were now
waiting for the kayaks to finish their rotation around the class. I clasped my hands in my lap, my fingers restless. Her proximity to me left me jumpy and tense, but I was determined to leave this class having made a friend. I tried to catch her eye and smiled, hoping it would ease the awkwardness. But she was craning her neck, looking over at the rest of the group behind me. I don’t know why she did that when she could already look right through me. She tapped her fingers agitatedly on the edge of the pool, sighing, her mouth a straight line. From a certain perspective, she could have seemed irritated by me, but I knew that wasn’t true. I would almost have preferred it if she had been irritated by, or even disliked me. At least that would mean that she’d seen me. When the bell rang, she sprung up and headed toward her friends, who were fawning over Jennifer in a circle, just as I was muttering a meek bye.
In the changing room, I shot through rows of girls chattering and giggling and found a cubicle in the corner. I hadn’t even finished locking the door when I felt the first tear, thick and hot as it streamed down my cheek and into the corner of my mouth. The saltiness was grounding. I looked at the four walls of the cubicle for what felt like the first time. I sat down on the closed toilet and cried.
Our final lesson of the day was art. I walked into the classroom, hair still damp but my face and eyes dry. Mr. Booth had told me in the morning that this class had a lot of Pakistani kids and I might find some comfort in that. I scuttled toward an empty seat, his hopeful words ringing in my head, and was just about to sit down when a hand shot out and covered it.
Sorry, this seat’s taken. I looked up to see a girl, Zoya, who I’d met that morning in homeroom. Her gaze was apologetic, but firm. I mumbled a statement of understanding and walked to the only other available seat in the room: at the boys’ table. They looked up with surprise, then sniggered amongst each other, shooting glances at me every so often. Around halfway through the class, one of them asked, Ayesha, do you ever speak?
Yes, I responded, not knowing what else to say.
Okay, he nodded, as if this was a sufficient answer for him.
I wondered if people looked at Jennifer and asked her if she ever spoke. Or if she ever had a reason not to. I wonder if people ever smacked their
hands down on seats to stop her from sitting there. I wondered if she could be a first choice even on her first day. I looked back at the table where Zoya was sitting, now accompanied by another girl, Imaan. The two of them were sharing a jug of paint-water, and squealed when Zoya almost knocked it over.
A boy called Yousif swung his head around. You’re a Paki, aren’t you?
The table broke out into sniggers again. This time, so did I. At the time, I thought the word was an abbreviation for Pakistani.
In the summer back from university, I start to visit the pool again.
In the years since I was fourteen, my mother would frequently ask me why I never went for a swim, when we finally had a pool of our own. My excuses were always different. I was busy with exams. It was too hot. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was too cold. I preferred other forms of exercise. Truth be told, even I didn’t really know why I’d entirely lost my appetite for swimming.
But perhaps after eight straight months of a harsh Canadian winter, accompanied by my brother’s incessant pleading, I found myself drawn to it again.
The first time, it was just me and my brother. It was a night swim, which was something that used to make me uneasy, but the warm floodlights lining the bottom of the pool and the glare of lights from the tennis court next door, brimming with the neighbours’ shrieks and giggles, made it almost inviting. It was just after sunset, and the freshly inked sky was splattered with swirling hues of purple and blue, in a glowing collision. If I had been in another part of the world I would have said they looked like the Aurora Borealis.
My brother dove into the deep end and took a few careless laps of the pool. I swam, a little bit, but marvelled more at the inexplicable tranquility of sitting in a pool of water. My sister trudged downstairs at some point in her pyjamas, saying that she would join but didn’t feel like washing her hair again tonight. She said she was just here for the music. My phone lay on a table, blaring its way through a playlist. She sat down on a chair near the poolside, closing her eyes and resting her head back. The song was “In the Meantime” by Spacehog. The three of us had watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. III last summer and the memory made me smile. I decided I liked swimming again, and threw myself on my back, kicking my legs up. They came tumbling right back down.
In July, my cousins come to visit.
Thrilled by the notion of a summer by the poolside, they had been eagerly asking to go swimming since their arrival. One day, after a long day at the mall and an even longer car ride back home, they and my siblings somehow reached the unanimous decision that tonight was the optimal time to go swimming. I was in no mood for any such activities. I was tired, and didn’t see how it would be an enjoyable experience. My aunt pointed out the same thing, saying that it had already been an exhausting day, and that we didn’t need to go tonight. But we aren’t going there to exhaust ourselves, we’re going so we can relax, my cousin Aleena pleaded, her eyes black and glittering, imploring. A wave of affection shot through me, and she did seem to have a point. So I agreed.
We were quite the sight, standing in a circle in the middle of the pool, a ragtag group of five with comically varying heights. Aleena singing her head off to “Pink Pony Club”, exclaiming over and over that it was her favourite song, while my brother repeatedly jumped into the pool, trying to cause a bigger reverberation in the water with each jump. My sister said something about coming of age, and my cousin Lilah went silent. Furrowing her brows with mock earnestness, a hopeful widening of her eyes, she imitated a line from a protagonist we’d watched in a coming-of-age film.
There was a moment of silence. Then, in unison, we burst into peals of laughter at Lilah’s impression. Amidst our laughter, my brother said, But we’re brown, don’t forget they’ll need to put a yellow filter over us.
This set off a fresh wave of laughter. As if to cement this image, Lilah solemnly raised her hands over her head and brought them together in a loud clap. Beginning as a guttural emanation from the depths of her throat, she began humming a vaguely, stereotypically South Asian tune, swinging her hips to the rhythm. That’s how they see us, she added, as if it wasn’t clear.
The five of us were screeching now, gasping for air in between shrieks of laughter, all of us shaking our hips before doubling over and collapsing into each other. I laughed so hard I fell over, but found myself lifted by the water.
Before my feet touch the ground again, I swear, it felt like I was floating.
Dead Fish
Audrey Lai
I remember spring and my house in the cul-de-sac, walking from the stop sign to the driveway after the school bus dropped me off. It was a house with a Bradford pear tree in the front yard, a tree that blooms tiny white flowers in the early springtime. The flowers would be beautiful if they didn’t smell like dead fish. It was odd that their bloom, signifying the season of rebirth, carried the scent of death from our house to our next-door neighbours’, the Adelmans. One year, they let the weeds take over their lawn and let the grass grow tall and they left their Christmas lights up even when it was already Easter. I used to be pretty close with Dahlia, the middle one, before that, when we were in sixth or seventh grade, but we didn’t really see each other after that except for in the school hallway.
In April, I was on the bus when I saw a “FOR SALE” sign on the Adelmans’ lawn plastered with an overzealous middle-aged blonde woman with her hands crossed and a plastic smile. Dad said it was a foreclosure, meaning the Adelmans couldn’t pay for the mortgage anymore and the banks were going to take it from them, and Mom said she heard from the other neighbours that when Dahlia’s dad heard the news, he had struck the kitchen island with a hammer: a jagged fissure running through the marble. It was where Dahlia and I used to watch her mom fix us pb&j sandwiches during playdates.
One evening, I was taking my bike back into the garage when I saw Dahlia standing under the Bradford pear tree. She looked up and saw me watching her.
Hi, I said tentatively, as if I was greeting a stray cat.
Hi, Dahlia said. Your tree stinks.
It does, I said. Every time your little brother came over in the spring he
would yell ‘pee-yew’ and accuse you of farting.
I totally forgot about that, Dahlia said, laughing. I smiled. She smiled back. We were still for a moment until Dahlia turned away and began to head home. Do you remember, I said suddenly, when we used to think about climbing onto my roof like in the movies?
Dahlia turned to look back at me, staring. I felt kind of dumb for a moment. Yeah, she said. I do remember.
Wordlessly, I led Dahlia through the foyer and up the staircase, pictures of little me and my baby sister strung up as we climbed up until we reached my bedroom. Cautiously, we dipped our heads under the window and sat gingerly on the ledge, not willing to scootch farther than that.
I thought I would have felt something there, like the moment in a TV show where everything is about to change and they say something really profound or the last song of an album where the end is here and it’s sad but also triumphant and you know everything will be okay. But I couldn’t think of anything to say, so Dahlia climbed back into the house and went down the staircase with all the pictures of me and my sister and through the foyer and my front door, the smell from the tree coming in like a dead fish had washed up on our shore.
Kasia Kaczmarek
ROLL CREDITS
Elias Ye
CW: Death, substance abuse
Chelsea drowns in her bathtub. It’s a Monday the 9th.
They say it’s an accident until Marius finds the empty Jim Beam under her pillow and two lonely white tablets behind the toilet.
“It’s probably you-know-what,” says Letty as Marius crawls out from under the toilet bowl. He drops them into one of Chelsea’s rinsing cups—this blue thing with pink print dolphins on it. The bathroom is very small which is what makes the clack-clacking of pills so loud.
They look into the cup for a moment in silence, shoulder to shoulder. Marius frowns, debating if he should hand it to the police. Instead, he takes one himself, just to confirm it is what they think it is—and sure enough.
Then he offers Letty the other, just for fun. Letty politely declines.
“Not anymore, remember?” she says softly. mmm
Marius shrugs. It’s this short, jerking motion that makes the cords of his neck spasm. Then he throws the remaining tablet up into the air. It glints, flipping over and over, arcing like a penny into a fountain until it lands flat on his tongue.
Nary a splash, thinks Letty.
They fuck in a motel room that night. Letty makes sounds like she’s dying for it; Marius makes no sound at all. They share a cigarette after, Letty with one long pale thigh draped artfully over the sheets as Marius cranks the window open.
The curtains ripple, off-white and wispy. It’s cold outside and it sends goosebumps up Letty’s arm.
Marius turns his finger around a hole in the curtain.
“I don’t know how to feel,” he says.
Letty is too busy admiring him from the back to respond.
“I don’t know,” he repeats, “how to feel.”
“Hey,” Letty says, “I get it. I do.”
She spreads her arms, a bit tentatively as if she was supposed to offer a hug two minutes ago but the cue flew way over her head. Marius just sighs.
“No, you don’t,” replies Marius, “you really don’t.”
He walks into the bathroom, shoulders rounded. The water runs.
Letty snubs her cigarette out against the bedframe and goes to close the window.
Naomi Marcus
Two days later, on her way to Chelsea’s funeral, Letty remembers the fourhundred dollar perfume she was going to bring but had left behind on the kitchen counter. She checks the time. She’ll be half an hour late if she goes back for it now.
Letty makes a U-turn at the next intersection.
Right after the funeral, Marius folds himself into the passenger seat of Letty’s car like a pigeon in a pigeonhole. His face is drawn and there’s a new sallowness to his cheeks that complements the black button-down he’s got on. Letty thinks it suits him. “How are you?” Letty asks.
Marius shakes his head. “How are you?”
“It’s been rough.”
“Hm.”
“But your eulogy was nice,” says Letty, “Chelsea would’ve loved it.”
They lapse into silence. The graveyard is right next to a six-lane highway; it fills the car with the sounds of rush hour. Letty debates turning on the radio.
Just as the emptiness swells enough to make the back of Letty’s neck sweat, Marius speaks. “I can’t keep doing this,” he says suddenly.
“Doing what?”
He closes his eyes, eyelids shuttering. He tucks his hands beneath his knees, then he doubles over dramatically as if he’d been shot.
“Just this. Us.”
Letty places her hand delicately on Marius’ thigh. “Why?”
“It’s too soon. After Chelsea,” he pauses, breathes heavily into the side of the glove box, “I just don’t think this is right.”
There’s a brief silence. Then Letty cocks her head and hits the play button on her dashboard: the pillowy intro to “You’re My Rose” wafts into the car.
“You know, I don’t mind,” says Letty, “even if it’s just to help you get your mind off it all.” Marius’ tongue flicks in and out, as if his mouth were wilting and he wanted to lick the dehydration out of them.
“You’re a saint,” he replies.
They fuck in the car after the funeral. Letty makes sounds like she’s dying for it; Marius makes sounds like he’s going to die of it. He mouths over her, mumbling about how good she smells, and privately, Letty thanks herself for going back for the perfume. They’re loud but it’s rush hour so the traffic drowns them out.
About twenty metres away, Chelsea’s mom sobs into the priest’s shoulder. The handkerchief she dabs her cheeks with has a slightly disfigured pink dolphin embroidered in the corner. “My darling girl,” she weeps, “my darling, darling girl.”
◊
Sometimes, when Marius decides to stay the night, Letty trails her finger along the lines of his back and thinks of becoming the person her dog thinks she is.
Weeks pass. They fuck. Marius grieves. Letty runs out of perfume and buys more, but in a fragrance that has less spice and more “Soft Oriental” to it. They fuck. Marius gets a new haircut. Letty asks him out to dinner; they have bottomless soup at Olive Garden. Letty bakes red velvet cookies, the soft kind with white chocolate and chopped walnuts; she shows up at Marius’ apartment with the cookies in a heart-shaped box and a bottle of red from Wine Rack. Marius puts on Goldfinger—it’s around when Letty realizes that this “Pussy” Bond’s talking about is actually the name of a character, that she also notices Marius has had almost all of the wine, but none of the cookies. The cookies are still on the kitchen table far, far behind them. To Coda.
In the morning, Marius tells Letty that she’s all he has and that without her he’d be so lost, so very lost and adrift, and this makes Letty feel better.
D.C. Al Coda, but this time they don’t watch anything, and the cookies are gingerbread.
Then Coda: They’re supposed to fuck, but Marius doesn’t show up, so Letty watches Halloween the movie, and Does Not Think About It.
The next Friday passes the same way; Marius leaves her on delivered, so Letty plays “Sonatina in D Major, Op. 36 No. 6” on her electric keyboard and thinks about how the splotchy Coda sign on her sheet music looks like the crosshairs of a sniper scope.
Letty gets a short apology text the next afternoon at 2 p.m. as she’s weighing herself. Just as she opens the conversation with Marius she glances down at the scale; it tells her she’s gained two pounds. It’s almost as devastating as the apology.
◊
Letty has this recurring dream where Chelsea and Marius get married. Marius still cheats, but not with Letty, and he’s more discreet about it, which delays Chelsea’s bathtub drowning to about two years later. Sometimes—if Letty has two glasses of Amaretto before bed—the whole kerfuffle fizzles out in a mostly-clean divorce ten years down the line in which Marius gets the dog and Chelsea gets the kids (this is bad news for the dog; Marius doesn’t like dogs). Meanwhile, they hold a small ceremony with just friends and family. Marius brings half of his rugby team; Chelsea brings Letty.
Then the dream smash-cuts to 8 p.m. at a Food Basics five years later in which Marius is high-strung and stressed and Letty is hot and unmarried, and they run into each other in the baby food aisle. The aisle is empty so Marius leans in for a kiss. Letty pushes him away because she’s dating a millionaire who owns a fancy orange juicer, while Marius is stuck with his poor attempts at fidelity and driving little Kevin to soccer practice on Thursday mornings. Oh, and a Honda Odyssey.
They don’t yell at each other because it’s Food Basics, and this isn’t a soap opera. But Marius does mutter some vile things under his breath before he leaves the aisle first. Letty leaves two minutes later and in the other direction.
Ba-Dum-Tss! Then Letty wakes up.
◊
“Are you alright, sweetheart?”
Letty blinks.
“Sorry?”
An old woman is waving her hand in front of Letty’s face. They’re in the cheese aisle at Metro—oh right she’s in the cheese aisle at Metro, for the cheese board oh Marius loves a good brie—and the woman’s calluses are thick and there’s flour stuck under her nails. She’s also got seven packs of Lunchables and what from a high-angle shot looks like ten kilograms of Granny Smith in her shopping cart.
“Lost you there honey, you’ve been looking at that cheddar for a good five minutes.” Letty smiles.
“Oh, just thinking about my cheddar half,” Letty says.
There’s a short, scripted pause before the woman doubles over laughing; it’s a dry wheeze that travels from her stomach up out her nose. It’s beautiful.
It’s a bit too cheesy for it to be funny for Letty, but Letty laughs anyway.
It just keeps happening. Like in those brilliant mid-tier movies where John and Jane have a torrid workplace affair and it ends with John going back to his wife and Jane jumping into La Seine and somewhere between the title sequence and the end credits there’re a couple of miscarriages and then another miscarriage. But Letty’s more careful than that. She’s different. She’s clever. She’s better.
Letty shows up at Marius’ place for Friday Night Fuck Night But This Time We Have A Cheese Board or whatever, but she finds Marius and another girl tangled together on the sofa.
Her name is Vivienne.
“Just a rebound,” says Marius as Vivenne huffs prettily in the background, “Chelsea meant so much to me. And you, you’re my ride or die but Vivienne’s a redhead and she plays slap bass. She’s a miracle worker. And we’re all in need of a miracle these days, you understand. I hope we can stay friends.”
Letty doesn’t feel like an argument so she gestures vaguely toward the
door. Marius frowns. “You’re not mad?”
You’re un-brie-lievable is what Letty wants to say, but it’s not appropriate. And the repressed bullshit has been a long time coming anyway so she starts an Oscar-worthy screaming match in the hallway outside his flat, and gets thrown out of the building by the one scruffy, unpaid-underfed security guard Avenue Parks Apartments keeps in the lobby for fun.
Letty walks home in the rain. Her eyeliner is waterproof and the wing is still sharp enough to kill a man, so no one knows that she’s sobbing the whole walk home.
Chelsea’s last thoughts weren’t about Letty, or Marius, or Letty and Marius. Letty thinks of her mother as she feels the pills take effect. It’s not Marius or Vivienne or Jake the dog. Last thoughts are reserved for your mom, she thinks as the water goes up her nose. She starts thrashing a bit for the drama of it and hits her ankle painfully against the side of the bathtub before we FADE TO BLACK.
Letty drowns in her bathtub. It’s a Saturday the 22nd.
About the Authors
Divine Angubua is a writer, editor, and arts enthusiast currently completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he is finishing a creative writing minor. He previously served as Editor-inChief of With Caffeine and Careful Thought, the UTM English Department’s creative writing journal, and is now the Arts & Culture Editor at The Varsity. His work has been published in The Pit Periodical (Montreal) and Liminul Magazine. Drawn to strangeness and beauty in all its forms, Divine finds inspiration in art, fashion, and the Queerness. He’s always on the lookout for great book recommendations.
Tehlan Lenius was born and raised in Toronto. She spends much of her time fantasizing about her next writing project and very little of her time actually writing it.
Cameron Boese is a third-year student in the English and Psychology programs. He is the recipient of the 2022-2023 Milton Wilson Prize at UofT, and you can find more of his work in The Spectatorial and The Trinity Review. He swears the most fun you can have in Toronto is seeing a drag show in the village, but can more often be found squirrel-watching around campus while trying to read.
Victoria Li (she/her) is an English Specialist student at the University of Toronto, originally from Hong Kong. Her work can be found in The Trinity Review, The UC Review, The Strand, and more. She herself, meanwhile, can be found overthinking on the couch of Caffiends.
Charlotte Lai (she/her) is an artist and daydreamer from Vancouver, Canada.
Currently, she yearns for the Coquihalla. Find more of her work, published and forthcoming, in Acta Victoriana, Minerva, and the Hart House Review
Nghi Nguyen studies English and Environmental Biology. He is interested in learning all of the world’s secrets and in solving its mysteries through making art. Because of a Disney nature documentary, he’s been fascinated by bears and our relationship to nature since he was nine.
Ella MacCormack is a year student studying and and at the esteemed _________ . In their spare time, Ella keeps looking for their birth year stamped on the sidewalk. They’re still looking. 2004 wasn’t a good year for sidewalks. Find other work from them printed at _________ .
Zo Friedman is a third-year Undergraduate student studying English, psychology and creative writing at the University of Toronto. Aside from casual metaphysical crises, they enjoy art, music, reading, and dogs. This is their first publication.
Audrey Lai is a third-year student studying English at the University of Toronto. She is the co-editor-in-chief of The Trinity Review and an associate editor for the Hart House Review. Her work can be found in Acta Victoriana, The UC Review, and Cleaver Magazine. She hails from the Midwest and has an affinity for the smell of lavender.
Ayesha Siddiqui is a third-year student at UofT studying History and English. Some of her work can be found in The Woodsworth Review, The Trinity Times, and The Varsity. She has three cats and enjoys sushi and making her way through her endless film watchlist (preferably both at once).
Elias Ye is a third-year computer science student at the University of Toronto. Outside of hobby writing (almost exclusively on their Apple Notes app), they enjoy good stuff like "Severance" (TV), better stuff like The Room, and losing at video games. They dream of running a cafe with many plants, funky decor, and cats. They thank Goose Fiction for being cool.
