Goose Fiction ┃ Volume 12 (2022-2023)

goose an annual review of short fiction

Volume 12 Spring 2023 Produced at Victoria College in the University of Toronto

GOOSE

Masthead CO-EDITORS IN CHIEF Allison Zhao Syeda Hasan ASSOCIATE EDITORS Sabina García Ortega Anita Mazumdar-Moscato Mackenzie Melichar Kiri Stockwood Simona Zaunius ILLUSTRATORS Karen Kan Ava Stedman Elaine Xiao LAYOUT EDITORS Allison Zhao Ashley An

Cover art by Karen Kan

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Editor’s Note We are so proud to present the 2022-2023 issue of Goose Fiction and grateful for the multitude of people who took part in its creation. Every year we are blown away by the imagination and skill of our featured authors, and we would like to thank all of our contributors for sharing their stories with us.

This year’s stories cover a huge range of themes, including nostalgia, magic, loss, and diasporic identities. They ask our readers to consider the spaces they occupy and invite them to see different worlds, whether fantastical or grounded in reality. It is consistently inspiring to see how the literary scene at the University of Toronto has continued to thrive.

We would also like to thank our team. To our associate editors, Sabina, Anita, Mackenzie, Kiri, and Simona: your passion for creative writing is incredible and your continued dedication across the whole process is what makes Goose as special as it is. To our illustrators, Karen, Ava, and Elaine: our journal is transformed and elevated by your artwork, and we are so proud to feature your talents. Lastly, to our readers: we hope you enjoy reading the journal as much as we did.

Allison Zhao and Syeda Hasan Editors-in-Chief, 2022-23

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Table of Contents

4

Fox Teeth

5

Nina Rafique

Carpet Metastasis

13

Salma Ragheb

Remembering Magic

28

Shirley Yue Chen

The Weaver

32

C. Kathleen Zhao

Kutsushita（靴下)

42

Pádraig T. Watson

Mother Mary

45

Mathea Treslan

To Walk on Floors of Gold

52

Bronwyn Brennan

About the Authors

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RAFIQUE

Fox Teeth NINA RAFIQUE CW: Blood, cannibalism, death The first time I saw the silver woman, she was kneeling by the muddy banks of the creek in those early humming hours of the evening. Her pale hair hung in thin currents down her shoulders, down her back, her hands outstretched to the water striders. At first I thought she was a fairy, or maybe a ghost—bleached, delicate thing, frozen in my lamplight. Then she turned around, eyes gleaming like a cat’s, teeth bared like a fox’s, and I saw the bright ruby blood down the front of her blouse.

She smiled.

That’s the story of how I met you.

Would you like another while the fire gets going?

I ran for help. When we came back, out of breath, the silver woman had collapsed face down into the water, murky bubbles escaping her mouth. One of the men and I pulled her limp body up onto the bank, her twiggy limbs snagging in the reeds, while the others called for the village doctor. In my arms, the woman trembled. Do you remember how you trembled? God, you were so cold. Then the lords, the townspeople were swarming us, two maids lifting her up by her arms, the young doctor walking with them back to town, away from me. Me, with her blood on my shirt, by the creek.

The next morning, I tramped my way over the damp fields to butcher’s row and took up my apron as if nothing had changed. A heavy, humid day— not good for the meat. I was sweeping bloody sawdust from the floor, the butcher somewhere in the back with his bonesaw, when the merchant’s wife

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brought news—the commotion last night? Had I seen? Had I heard? Yes, a countess, young thing, here to visit for a spell, recover her health—wandered away from her carriage, hurt herself by the creek, poor thing! She was staying at the village manor, the merchant’s wife said—and who knows what could have gotten to her, had the doctor not come!

That evening I tried to spot her through the third floor window, as I picked pig’s blood out from under my nails. A pale orange square, the soft flicker of candlelight. She’d undergone a shock, the merchant’s wife said. But those teeth. I saw her teeth. I saw the blood on her blouse. I remember.

Watch the fire.

My, you’ve been greedy tonight.

The next day, the silver woman requested to see me. Two guards took me to her room, then silently flanked the door. When I entered she was sitting by the open window, bundled in a blanket like a child. Her face was more human in the daytime—a little pink played in her cheeks, in the corners of her eyes. The lines of her lashes and brows were somehow darker, more decisive. She raised her chin and smiled when she saw me. The cold was getting in.

“Good morning,” she said, pulling the blanket snug. I stared. There was still a bit of dried gut on my apron. When I didn’t say anything, she tilted her head.

“You work at the butcher’s, yes?” she asked, pleasantly.

“Yes,” I managed. I was trying to get a glimpse of her teeth, with little luck.

“Good,” she said. “Good.” She stood up from her chair, blanket still clutched around her shoulders, and wandered closer to the window. I took a few steps back as she moved, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Do you know who I am?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t have a guess?” “...A countess? The visiting countess?”

“No.” She fiddled with the edge of her blouse. “No.” Her blouse, pristine and white.

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“You ought to be dead,” I said. “Last night, there was too much blood.” I set my jaw, and she seemed amused. “You aren’t the countess.”

“I am not,” said the silver woman, languid. “The countess is dead.

Though this”—here she gestured to her body—“recently belonged to her.”

“Are you a witch?” I tried to sound controlled, assured. I had a knife in my skirt pocket—but the guards outside the door. The guards outside the door.

“I’ve been a fox, a prince, a snake, a widow, and an owl, among other things,” she said, examining her perfect oval nails. “...And now, I suppose I’m a countess. You see, out of all of them, the prince was my favourite.” She sighed. ”I’ve been chasing the feeling for quite a bit. It’s always so difficult to find the next body.”

The next body. In the months to come, we would spend many hours on the topic. Her obsession with finding the finest hair, fairest skin, always on to the next body.

But for now, she undid the pearly buttons of her blouse, then pulled aside a seam of flesh to reveal the red cavity at her sternum. The edge of a rib or two peeked shyly through the wound, like snail shells hiding in sand. I didn’t blanch—this disappointed her, then amused her.

“This body is mine now.” She leaned over, the ruby gash rippling with the shift of her shoulder. “I took it fair and square, dear. And you, well, I could take you too if I wanted to. Put down the knife, please.”

If anything my grip tightened, white knuckles curled around the blade’s handle.

Her cat’s eyes gleamed. “I want to help you. I want this body to last— if I don’t take certain steps to replenish it, it will fall apart on me, sooner rather than later. But if you help me sustain it… Well, then I could give you anything the countess here could ask for. Money, clothes, lodgings. You could spend your days eating tenderloin instead of cutting it. And neither of us would meet our ends at the other’s hands.” She leaned forward, intent. “What do you say?”

Silence. There was a fly smacking against the window pane. Long, long heartbeats passed. She kept her gaze with me steady, two sharp diamonds boring into my skin.

In the end I was the one to break first. I sighed, then put my knife away.

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The silver woman’s whole face lit up. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

She pushed the pane open further, letting the fly cross into the room.

“We’re going to do well together, I think.”

Isn’t it funny? Throughout everything that happened, everything I would come to think about you, I never once stopped feeling the dread that took root in me at that moment.

There the fly danced in hazy, irregular zags.

“Oh,” she breathed, watching it. “The last one of the season.”

And she snapped it between her teeth like an adder.

The flames, they leap from the coals.

That day your cheeks were pink from the flies, weren’t they?

Glutton I was given a room at the manor, three fine dresses, and a woman who did my hair twice a week. ”You must stay clear of the townspeople,” said the silver woman. “They will not understand why I’ve given you my favour, and they will gossip.” So I stayed clear, and tried to ignore the occasional confused, distrustful glances from under shop awnings and flat caps.

She and I met every evening to discuss business over dinner—my dinner, that is. She would set out an empty teacup and saucer for herself though, so that I wouldn’t feel left out. The first problem was that of the countess’s family. Of course, they were under the impression that their frail daughter was safe in her calm, inconsequential village, healing in the clean country air.

With her luggage she’d brought a stack of letters, unsent, and a small diary for the trip. It took me hours to learn her timid, sloping hand, the silver woman hovering by my shoulder the whole time. She knew so much about the world—had been to so many places, been so many people—but in all her years and all her bodies she had never learned to write. I found this amusing.

“When you’re a bird,” she would pout, “or a farmhand, you have no need! When you’re a snake, you have no limbs at all!” I would laugh a little, and oh, she would huff and puff, but within a minute she would be over my shoulder again, asking me to tell her what the letters meant.

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By nightfall she’d be ravenous. The silver woman had a special diet of sorts—she needed to consume the flesh of live creatures, hearts still beating, in order to keep up the corpse’s colour. By moonlight, we would sneak out of the manor, down past the creek, and prowl the woods for her nighttime meals. For a while we would cross the lush forest floor, speaking in hushed tones. Then I would split off to lay wire traps, scout the area, while she began stalking her prey. It didn’t bother me, seeing her kill things. I’d thought it would. Teeth and nails, she would sink them into a deer’s hide like an animal and bleed the life out of it while it bucked. When she was finished, she would stand upright in that smooth, unbothered way of hers, blood smearing the corners of her mouth, and say, “Let’s go home, dear, and make you some tea.

You must be cold.”

Some nights, I would jump at every twitch and sound in that sunless wood. I would follow the silver woman through the underbrush and keep asking her, “Lady, do you not fear the hunters? The butcher’s men whose game you steal? Are you not scared they’ll find you? Are you not scared?”

And every time she would answer, “Of course not.” She’d lend me a small smile. “The scariest thing in this forest is me.”

The first time she courted me, she brought me scores of dahlias, chrysanthemum, and oleander, all freshly pulled from the ground, their roots still dressed in soil. She would trail laughing down the front stone steps of the manor, take my calloused hands in hers, soft and earthy, and press the basket of blooms into my chest. We would take long strolls by the creek, and she would wander off, then come back wiping burgundy bits of squirrel heart from her chin, the blue of her eyes rejuvenated.

I would’ve eaten the foxglove, if she’d asked me. I would’ve picked the petals myself.

Then there was the young doctor, the prideful type—he seemed to expect the ground itself to be thankful for him. His gracing of the village with his expertise. And of course, after the poor countess’s shock, her injury by the creek in her already frail condition—why, she needed him more than ever!

You must drink this, the young doctor would say.

“No, no, the flavour disagrees with the countess,” I would counter.

You must stay inside, the young doctor would say.

“Oh, but see how her colour has returned!”

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AVA STEDMAN

You are delicate. You are fragile. You need help.

“No,” the silver woman would snarl. “I am stronger than ever.”

Lilies, lobelia, foxglove.

Flowers on my tongue.

Splinters of bone stuck to your molars, blood on your bottom lip.

Your soft unnatural radiance, which seemed enough to fill my own skin with light. You glowed enough for the two of us.

My star, my orbit, you raged enough for the two of us.

Fall turned to winter, and winter turned to spring, and with spring came the muggy, melting press of March showers upon the countess’ corpse— finally, after all those months, it began to rot. First, it was the fine pale hair, getting caught on passing branches in strands, then ribbons, then clumps.

Then the eyes lost their blue, incandescent quality—they became two dull bruises, sunk into a clammy, sour face. She grew irritated, despondent,

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withdrawn. Of course I did my best, to buy perfumes to cover the smell, to paint her face with powders and hope, pray no one noticed, of course I did.

But we both knew the body would not last her much longer. Something had to be done.

She wanted to stay in the village, but there were few good candidates.

The young doctor? No, the job was too demanding. The merchant? The butcher? No, they had spouses to deal with.

“I could always go back to being a fox, or maybe a snake.” She grimaced at the thought. “Though I wouldn't want to leave your side.”

She spent a long time looking at me that evening. At my hair, my hands, my neck. Her eyes were intent, gleaming with some of their old brightness under the pus. And that night, when it was time for her to split off and hunt, she just stood and stared at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said softly. “Nothing.”

I knew from that moment that it was over, as lovely as it all was. There was nothing more to be done for her. She needed the next body, simple as that. She would come for me in the morning, I was sure of it, sink her teeth into my rib cage and take me— unless I took her head off first.

Standing there in the moonless wood, I supposed that all things must end. So I went down to butcher’s row to get the bonesaw. When the merchant’s wife saw me walking down the street, tool in hand, and asked me wherever was I going? Whatever was I doing? I laughed and replied, providence.

But the silver woman got to me first.

You snore when you sleep.

I never told you that.

She tore into me, oh, she tore into me, didn’t she. Tucked into my chest as a fox does, little red snout pushing aside my ribs, little white teeth at my heart. To steal it away to her bloodstained burrow, famished, where she could admire her own restraint. How good of her, not to eat the thing she loves.

How good of her, not to close her jaws.

She got me right by the creek, crashed into me from the side, and I lost

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my grip on the bonesaw. I saw her face though, before the water. She was disappointed in me.

You were my story, weren’t you?

You were all there was ever going to be.

I understand now, that this is the only way you could love me.

Lobelias. I don’t remember the moment she changed me, except for lobelias.

I remember when the fire started.

I remember the blooms.

I remember when the fire started.

The blooms and veins.

We’ve put it off long enough, now.

The fire, shall we?

The hole you made in my chest bled till dawn, leaving a sticky red path down my blouse, down the road as we walked home. The church steeple shone in the morning light, as if the sun’s hand itself had reached down to grasp it, to shun you. One last look. Then the men will come and see us standing there, a river parting my chest in two, cat’s eyes gleaming, fox’s teeth bared, and they will scream, scream through every hollow step we take towards them, scream as they gather the village, throw us to the pyre and wail. You know the rest.

I still maintain: the flames have nothing on your eyes.

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Carpet Metastasis SALMA RAGHEB CW: Death When we were nine, Fairuz and I used to sit next to each other, each with her own notebook. Then we would switch and continue the other’s story. One day, when we switched notebooks, I found shapes on the page instead of words.

“Why are you drawing?” I asked her.

“I am not drawing. This is a new language,” she said, shrugging her left shoulder.

Between my inability to understand this language and my attempt to hide this fact from her, I’d felt paralyzed. In this way, she ended the stories we wrote together.

Until, two months later, I asked her, “How many languages do you know?”

She said, “Just Arabic and English.” *** I immersed myself in English books to catch up with her. She had taken a great interest in English. My interest was more muddled; I hadn’t been interested in English, only in her interest of it. She felt writers were more indecent and crude there. She called this new language a portal of escape, without the tell-tale consequence of being missing.

I recognized her as a source of jealousy. When she moved to America for college, I followed her. We went to the same university. She studied art history & Middle Eastern civilization and I, stem cell neurobiology. *** From the oncologist I’d shadowed in my first year, I learned that the

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immune system fails to recognize cancer cells, so they break membranes and migrate to other parts of the body; they metastasize, sustaining their own growth, undeterred. But in their ambition, they forget the significance of the host that sustains them. They forget that if they kill the host, they, too, will die.

I’d been excited to learn this, and I couldn’t wait to tell Fairuz—but something had tugged at me then, that maybe I shouldn’t tell her, that in my inability to use a sufficiently detached language, she might somehow take it personally, that there would be a blind spot of subtext I had failed to recognize. In my first year, when I’d been so excited about sharing a unit with Fairuz, I’d kept contextualizing everything I learned with what I imagined would be her response. *** After class, Kenzy and I went to the library together. I’d met Kenzy seven months ago then. But it was not until that day—as we sat across from each other at the library table—that he asked me where I’m from.

“Egypt,” I said.

He smiled, “Me too.”

We looked at each other.

Silence chafed between us. We were testing each other: waiting for the other to speak Arabic first, to be vulnerable first. With the knowledge that we both accommodated an Arabic dialect that had been latent—eye contact became the only safe language. In this chafe, each of us imagined what the other sounded like in Arabic. It was embarrassing, as if we had been imagining each other naked.

Then, as if we hadn’t already been speaking for over an hour, he said “How are you?” in Egyptian dialect. This is how all Egyptians began talking with each other.

He sounded clumsy in English. In his perfect American accent, he sounded like he had a mouthful of food, and he spoke such that it never fell out. In Egyptian, he was well-fed.

When in Egypt, I would roll down my window and cuss out in Arabic at the driver of the microbus cutting past me. Here, I suddenly felt shy in front of him: like he had asked me to show him my birthmark.

Finally, I responded. “How are you?”

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“I’m good,” he said, glowing.

We talked like we had just met, all the previous seven months in English erased, like a sort of lingual retrograde amnesia. We asked each other about our siblings again, but in Arabic now, as if the answers would be more genuine. And they were.

We were entirely different people in Arabic. He was funnier, and he sounded less derivative; he didn’t sound like a mosaic of all the characters from the books and shows he had consumed to learn English. He sounded like his parents, his sisters, derivative still, but the source from which he derived was not scripted, not edited, but real.

It was only in Arabic that we’d remembered to ask about each other’s mothers. We talked about how they made up their own English: P’s became B’s; longer ee sounds became softer e sounds so that beaches became bitches; pitches became bitches; peaches became bitches, and bitches—naturally— remained bitches. This language, my mother argued, lends itself to vulgarity.

Fairuz said that the Egyptian accent that carries over when trying to speak a new language—a language that insults women less—clings to the phonetic approximation of a feminine insult in innocuous words.

Our mothers would also add S’s where they shouldn’t. They would say togezers instead of together, so that an already collective term brims with an unbearable redundant intimacy. These forced pluralities summarize a cultural distinction between Egyptian ideals and the singularity inseparable from American dialogue and persona.

We talked about the dust in Cairo; it’s a sepia filter that makes the city pictorial, fixed in a particular texture of the past. We talked about the cotton candy man in downtown Cairo, how cotton candy in Egyptian dialect literally means “girls’ hair,” and how, in the 1998 movie Smile, The Picture Will Turn Out Nice, when Mona Zaki gets into med school, her dad in the movie—actor Ahmed Zaki—buys her the entire stick from the cotton candy man for five Egyptian pounds (22 cents). We’d guessed that the entire cotton candy stick would, now, cost 100 pounds because the exchange rate was fucking the Egyptian pound over so much that even the committal gesture of pricing stickers became American. And while we considered 100 pounds expensive, neither of us had been able to think of a vendor, here, in America, where you could buy 100 cotton candy bags for four dollars. As I

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write this now, an American dollar is worth 30 Egyptian pounds. Maybe it is my acquired American capitalist perspective (I still don’t know the word for capitalism in Egyptian dialect; it is not as urgent to know it), but I think that it is like this that America continues to diminish Egyptian worth in an increasingly transactional world, fractionating an Egyptian pound into less and less of an American dollar, the fractions becoming so small; they become asymptotic.

But this is not what I had been thinking about then.

I’d been thinking about how—since she’d chosen Art History & Middle Eastern Civilization—Fairuz would never get cotton candy for getting into med school like Mona Zaki.

But I just might. *** Kenzy insisted on walking me home that day—something he’d never done before. As we walked together, I felt embarrassed by the skirt I’d worn in front of him because he knew I was Egyptian. It was a tacit way of policing; Egyptian mothers sent out their sons into the world as agents to discipline all Egyptian girls, to remind them where they came from. Although I had worn skirts in front of him before, he had only commented on it then. It was just another way of his to demonstrate he was Egyptian.

Suddenly, we were speaking in slang, trying to sound casual, waiting for the other one to feel alienated by a particular word, and in one’s alienation was the other’s comfort in being more Egyptian.

I invited him in for tea, and he’d refused, and I was supposed to ask at least twice more. This act had been done by many Egyptians before, and our rendition of it was necessary, now that we had both acknowledged the culture we shared.

One of his most Egyptian cards to play was to be sexist. If I were an American girl, he would try his best not to be sexist, to show how progressive Egyptian guys can be. But I am an Egyptian girl, so he understood that I understood about the underlying filth and aggression; there was no point in pretending, so he appealed to the Egyptian archetype I knew.

Microaggressions were not a thing in Egypt. Really, the only reason we knew the prefix micro- was for microbus. ***

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Fairuz had bought us tickets to see Faig Ahmed’s exhibition. She’d bought one for my sister too, but Lamar was too busy for surprises. So I took Kenzy instead. Fairuz stood outside the gallery and smiled when she saw me.

Then she saw Kenzy.

“This is Kenzy,” I said.

Kenzy extended his hand to her, and she said, “Fairuz,” ignoring his extended hand.

“Fairuz … like the singer?” Kenzy smiled, putting his hand back in his pocket.

“Yes. But I’m Egyptian,” she said.

Kenzy gestured between us and switched to Arabic, “Then why are you speaking in English?”

Fairuz and I looked at each other. We only ever addressed each other in English by then.

She stuck to English, “Do you know who Faig Ahmed is?”

I was embarrassed by Kensy’s insistence to speak Arabic and by her insistence to speak English in response. I wondered—with some voyeurism— who would subdue the other.

I noticed that more than wanting to bring Kenzy to the exhibition, I wanted him to meet her. I wanted to see what it looked like when an Egyptian guy treated an Egyptian girl with the same respect he would an American girl. And somehow, I knew that she would be the one person to elicit this respect—not me, not Lamar, not any other girl.

Kenzy quickly switched to English and cleared his throat. “No, I don’t know who he is, but… ” She seemed so hostile that Kenzy trailed off. He didn’t know how to accommodate her Egyptianness that was eclipsed by this foreign overlay she wouldn’t give up. *** Inside the exhibition, Fairuz stood next to Kenzy before a carpet that started with a traditional pattern which then switched to irregularly stacked horizontal strips of glitches, each strip like a digitized DNA sequence.

I lingered at a distance behind them, enough so I could listen.

Fairuz said in English, “What do you think of this one?” She fixed her gaze on him.

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Kenzy turned to glimpse at her then quickly looked back at the carpet.

“It’s weird.”

She turned to the carpet and crossed her arms.

“Weird how?”

“It’s just weird.” He grimaced.

She smiled.

I wanted to apologize to her for having let her waste her time talking to him. I felt embarrassed for knowing him. While confident in front of me, he crumbled in front of her. It was like a Joseph Albers color exercise: while next to me, he glowed; next to her, he was dull.

A maroon carpet caught my eye. Two-thirds of it traditional, its remaining third parsed out the colors of the threads into distinct lanes that pooled together into a big marble puddle with extended irregular appendages like amoeba. The carpet looked as if it was going to extend toward us and eat the gallery floor, like it was resisting containment, and this rebellion was so unlikely, untraditional, unseemly that I didn’t know how I felt.

Suddenly, Fairuz was by my side. We stayed quiet for a while. Then she said, “I’m jealous of Faig Ahmed.”

I couldn’t understand this remark. I believed that jealousy must be prompted by people that could be our rivals, not people who were so well beyond us in skill and ambition. I felt jealous of the bounds of her jealousy.

Even in this, I was humble compared to her. No one seemed to be out of reach as her muse of jealousy; it was childish, but it was also vaguely vulgar. *** When we went back home, she played Fairuz’s “Konna Netlaka,” and she sang. The edgelessness of her voice, the way it didn’t go back lower, the way I couldn’t predict when it would draw in, the way it flared without containment, without funneling into a vortex, frightened me. The same way you would feel if you woke up at dawn and could no longer detect a horizon: the border of the sky bleeding into that of the earth. Where does it end?

Where is the boundary? *** The next day, I attended Lamar’s guest lecture at my university on quantum mechanics and special relativity for philosophy students who had no previous background on the topic.

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When she asked rhetorical questions, she sounded so eager, her tone recreating an amateur curiosity that should’ve been dulled by now. As I looked at Lamar then, enthusiastic about the nonbinary character of light, I felt mad at her for believing that photons are without mass: that they can be both particles and waves.

When the student beside me started to fall asleep, I dropped my bottle to wake him, and he glared at me. When I returned his glare, he asked, “What did I miss?”

“Cats. Dead and alive simultaneously.”

“What are you talking about?”

But his question wasn’t curious, it was a grimace. Fairuz wouldn’t like him. I imagined how Fairuz would respond if I had said that. She would have asked, “Are the cats, like, undead?” Then, somehow, we would end up talking about vampires and Carmilla and Laura and blood. I would say that it’s not a great book, and then she would shrug her left shoulder, but not with great conviction. Then we would tune in again to my sister talking about a particle that goes through two slits at the same time, and relativistic time that stretches and contracts to accommodate a constant speed of light, as a theory that borders on fact. And I would feel something that borders on discomfort.

And Fairuz would feel something that knows no borders. *** The next day I had class with Kenzy. And I’d worn a skirt.

As soon as we stood side by side to walk to class together, he looked at my skirt and said, “A bit short, no?”

And I felt conventional. His sexism and his Arabic placed me. I felt relieved. Maybe it was this, maybe it was many things together, but I recognized Kenzy as an important person in my life: a source of cultural grounding.

When he walked me home, I invited him to come up and watch the 1968 film Fire of Love by Soad Hosny, and he accepted. Fairuz and I had never watched an Egyptian film together since we moved here, but I thought that bringing Kenzy would sanction it somehow. *** I sat between Fairuz and Kenzy. While we watched, Kenzy kept expressing his crush on Soad Hosny. Fairuz and I glanced at each other every

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time he did this. There was not a term for crush in Egyptian dialect, and the closest term was too affectionate for what he’d meant; using it would impose an unbearable vulnerability that Kenzy didn’t intend—that wasn’t masculine and promiscuous enough. So, Kenzy probably felt more comfortable with the casualness of the English term and its noncommittal lightness.

We spoke in English about the film, but there were no English expressions to talk about a film like this. It was like having Mulukhiyah with a fork instead of bread; there was no traction for the culture to hold onto. The only way to speak about it in English was to say it was sexist, rudimentary.

She’s passive-aggressive; she’s breadcrumbing him—these contemporary words that have made a psychoanalyst out of every American.

How to say passive-aggressive or breadcrumbing in Egyptian dialect?

After some time, Fairuz expressed that she, too, had a crush on Soad Hosny. In Egyptian dialect.

Kenzy turned to look at her in a precursor of a grimace that wasn’t courageous enough to take full form, confused by the crassness that even he’d been trying to avoid. But she had pried a glint of curiosity from him. He felt challenged by her.

If I hadn’t been sitting in the middle, I would have smiled.

Fairuz looked at him and smiled on behalf of us both. *** For my graduation gift, Fairuz bought me a carpet. Not a Faig Ahmed carpet—a normal carpet. And this normality felt like an insult somehow. Her decision to not own a Faig Ahmed carpet was a capitalist decision; it was too expensive. I was deterred by much more: when my sister or family came over, they would hate it. Fairuz seemed to know this, and her gift seemed to be an acknowledgement of her knowledge, but she was mocking me for it.

Kenzy gave me tapes of all the Soad Hosny films. We watched them together over the next four years of our graduate studies, and we talked about them in Arabic. He talked about how beautiful Soad Hosny was, and I learned to keep quiet when he did so.

As we watched the 1969 film Nadia, in the last few days of our final graduate year, he asked me to marry him. Naturally, I accepted.

He had great cultural insurance.

I thought a lot about what I would have said if Fairuz had been there.

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*** When I told Fairuz that Kenzy and I were getting engaged, she laughed.

She laughed in the same way my mom laughed when—at seven—I said I would eat all the cotton candy in the world.

“I’m serious. I’m going to marry him.”

She got up from the couch, walked over to me, and tucked my hair behind my ear.

“Are you going to say something?” I asked.

She stayed quiet still.

“Say something.”

In Egyptian dialect, she said, “When I can afford it, I will get a Faig Ahmed carpet for your new house with him. He’ll like it.” She smiled, slid her finger between my ear and the strand of hair she’d tucked, and untucked it. Then she left the room.

This is how to say passive-aggressive in Egyptian dialect. *** After we had both completed our masters, Fairuz left the unit we shared together and never came back. When we were completing our PhDs—I, at a new university, she, at the same one—I found out she’d been going by Fai, diluting herself. She hadn’t had a Kenzy to ground her as I did.

Our different relationships to Kenzy—mine an engagement, hers a tolerance—was a principal distinction between us. While I could wear a skirt and be reminded who I was supposed to be, Fairuz did not have this reminder. Simply because she rejected it; she rejected being told who to be; she rejected sexism and religion as tantamount to Egyptian identity.

I marveled at her ability to do this, but I also felt her a traitor, foolish, undeterred by what people were saying about her back home, immune to all the Kenzys she encountered, surpassing the barriers of her Egyptian principles: going on in a malignant ambition to be what she liked. It was selfish. It was cancerous.

During our undergrad, when she shaved her head, Kenzy stayed quiet.

When she sang along to Fairuz’s “Habbo Baadon” on vinyl, she didn’t make a mistake with the lyrics. When she prayed with us, no one shamed her for whatever she had done before praying. She maintained the right to remain Egyptian while she exhibited another country’s ideology. It was a

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duality I could not grasp; it felt like one should contradict the other. She was Schrodinger’s cat; the ambitious particle that passed through both slits at once; a particle and a wave. She embodied dualities whose concurrence should have annihilated her, swallowing her into a singularity. Eventually, she was annihilated, but not into a singularity: into abundant multitudes. *** One day, when we were both 39, Fairuz called me. I picked up immediately.

She said, “I have brain cancer.”

I stayed silent. She stayed silent.

Then she hung up.

I felt relieved that the world contained something more aggressively ambitious than her. *** I went to see her when I heard from her family that she had progressed to stage four. It was not remorse that prompted me to see her.

When I sat by her bedside, I noticed she looked so much older than 41.

A few tufts of her hair remained, and a patch near her temple held a relatively longer strand. She looked back at me, with a determination that remained intact. She told me she refused to shave her hair.

I reached into my bag and took out the notebooks we had written in as children, with the new endings I had written when I first found out about her cancer. I wanted her to read them, to praise me; I stood like a student awaiting her evaluation. But she ignored the notebooks. She held my wrist tight and sat me back down.

She got closer to me.

“I won’t die,” she said in Arabic, her eyes moving left and right in a tight space range like the middle sphere in Newton’s cradle. She didn’t sound delusional; she sounded certain. But she also wasn’t reassuring me; she was challenging me in some way. I felt angry at the vulnerability I’d expected but hadn’t found.

“But, Fairuz,” I said in English, “you will.” I paused to look at her face and continued: “The tumor broke the blood-brain barrier; really, it’s extraordinary.”

“You think I’m extraordinary?” she asked in Arabic still.

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“At sabotaging yourself, yes.” I said in English.

“Tell me, in Arabic, that I’m extraordinary,” she dared me, still, in Arabic.

“What?” I maintained, in English, still looking at the ground. I started to focus less on what she was saying and more on her insistence to speak in Arabic.

As kids, maybe 11, we played a game called Coward’s Curb. We would stand in the middle of the street and when we saw a car approaching, whoever ran to the safe sidewalk first was a coward. Just before I gave in, my heart would pound in my chest as I saw the car drawing closer. I’d kept looking at her, Fairuz looking back at me, shrugging her left shoulder. I had always given in first (when my autonomic fear of being crushed dominated my fear of appearing a coward to Fairuz). I felt a fraction of this fear then, in the hospital, scared by the inevitability of my giving in first.

“Tell me, in Arabic, that I’m extraordinary at sabotaging myself,” she said in Arabic still, too tired to sound like she was arguing. I saw her smile a bit.

I turned my face away from her. My heart throbbed in my chest. I wanted to cry.

She spoke again, in Arabic still, as if to lighten the situation but to childishly reassert herself, “Did you read about the A.I. that was trained to detect different types of bread and was later repurposed to detect cancer cells?”

I started crying then. I looked at her. She held my hand.

“It makes you think: what can bread and cancer have in common?”

In Egyptian dialect, the word for bread is the Arabic word for life. *** She died at 43. I felt relieved knowing that this is the fate of cancerous people like her: her ambition was a detriment, and in her idiocy, she forgot the familial tradition that sustains her. She spared me from making unconventional choices by having done them herself, and it was a fate that I could watch metastasize in front of me, as a cautionary tale. *** When your tumor is like that of Fairuz, it is worth a lot. In her will, she donated her tumor to my stem cell and cancer lab. It was a big day, we had a photographer take pictures of the tumor for our gallery archive. There was a picture of me looking at the tumor in the glass container, peeking through

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like a curious child looking at their goldfish, the tumor covering one of my eyes in the picture, while the glass distorted the remainder of my face the way a fish bowl does. This image captured a childlike fascination that clashed with what I had been thinking then. Because what I had been thinking then was how much I’d wanted to swallow her tumor. *** I named her tumor in the conventional nomenclature: the first two letters of her first name and the first two letters of her last; Fairuz Tehran was clipped into FaTe. I took the glass jar to my private lab. I split her tumor in two: half of which I placed in a new jar with the preserving buffer; the other half I lysed with a buffer that would digest the mass and allow us to culture it. I left the intact part of her tumor in my private lab, then I cultured her cells in the public lab. There were maybe five dozen 24-well culture plates stored in the incubator. An English graduate student felt courageous enough to suggest that 96-well plates might work better. I ignored him, and he scurried off. But he was right.

I was conflicted about what to hope for. I wanted this FaTe cell line to continue, but I didn’t want her to go on, immortal, her ambition intact, even in culture.

At 3 a.m. I was still in the lab, alone, but I looked around anyway. I could have gone to my private lab, but something about being in the public lab thrilled me, then. I walked around the lab to make sure no one was still there. I turned off the main lab lights. I tied my hair up. I took off my mask and my gloves. I opened the lid of one of the culture plates. I closed my eyes.

I brought the 24-well plate close to my face the same way you do with a hot waffle heavy with fruit.

Then, I dipped my tongue in each of the 24 wells of FaTe. You can see, I’m still a coward. *** The next day, I stained the cells in one plate of FaTe with green, fluorescent viability dye. When I looked under the microscope, I saw all the cells glowing, alive. Then I added paraformaldehyde to fix her cells.

Paraformaldehyde freezes cells in time and medium, like an immortal static artwork; it kills them.

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*** When I went to check on the fixed cells, they still glowed green in my face, defiant, in the dim microscope room. I spent the day running different tests to believe that the cells were still alive. It was paranoia in experimental design. *** At home, on the day I tried to fix her cells, I saw that the carpet she had given me started metastasizing, and it kept metastasizing, uncontained by borders, uncontained by the membranous white mesh at the bottom, uncontained by the bounds of the room. I had this paranoid thought that she found out, somehow, that I’d tried to fix her cells. Her countermove was to make this moving, live carpet. The carpet invaded other architectural organs that shouldn’t contain it, going into the kitchen, into the bathroom, coiling its threads, multiplying.

I would never tell Kenzy this, and maybe I am going crazy, but I think—and I don’t know how—that the carpet contains her. Her ambition extrapolated after her death. Even in her death, she mutated traditional carpets into something aberrant. She expanded cancer’s target to the abiotic; she bypassed cancer in ambition. And when I tried to find comfort in the fact that her immortal, undead ambition has no potential: I realized later that she was becoming a better Faig Ahmed.

I was certain that Kenzy could never find out about this and the simple solution was to break off our marriage. This decision, which should have had more emotional valence, carried instead the weight of getting rid of a computer bug, of troubleshooting. The quickness with which I made the decision to break off my relationship with Kenzy (really, I had spent more time deciding between the 12 and the 24 well-plates to culture FaTe) because of a carpet that metastasized in my house—the pettiness of the reason and the true superficial surrealism of it—revealed to me that I had been waiting to choose Fairuz. This carpet forced me to make a choice then between FaTe and Kenzy, and I chose FaTe. But it was only now that I could comfortably choose her: when she wasn’t there to acknowledge my choosing her, when she wasn’t in any capacity to reciprocate because her reciprocation would initiate something that I wasn’t ready to accept.

This—a metastasizing carpet—I can accept. Light as nonbinary, as

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particle and wave; cats as alive and dead simultaneously, my sister can accept.

Three separate words with the same pronunciation as bitch, my mother can accept. The women in my family, we believe crazy things to distract ourselves from wandering off. This wandering off—we have watched in Fairuz—this lysing of boundaries, this rebellion, has a fate of self-destruction. *** I stood up from my couch and knelt down in front of my nightstand, in front of the jar of her unlysed tumor. It surpassed my eye level by a bit, so I looked up at it. I noticed that the tumor is slowly being broken up by the medium.

I couldn’t maintain any relationships because I would eventually remember the metastasizing carpet at home. I didn’t want to explain the carpet to anyone. So I became a nun of sorts, committing myself to her immortal tumor. And she, shedding bits of her tumor like crumbs in return.

This is how to say breadcrumbing in Egyptian dialect.

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KAREN KAN

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Remembering Magic SHIRLEY YUE CHEN CW: Death

I remember that you came in the middle of grade seven, a week or so after me. You sat beside me and barely occupied the seat. You preferred to be the life of the party. You were always laughing in the middle of classes and conversations that I half-understood.

And I thought, wasn’t being loud an American thing?

I kept my head down and read and envied. Then I walked home for lunch so I didn’t have to eat cold food and be alone.

For P.E, we played Manhunt. I ran and stopped at the edge of the playground. I stared at the maples, those Canadian staples. The ones back home were prettier.

You stumbled onto me and said this was a horrible hiding spot. You told me to follow you and I did, after a few heartbeats. Brambles and thorns parted for you like water. Soon, we were in the depth of the woods.

Red and green and gold.

A dog barked in the distance. You looked nervous.

“What’s the fun in waiting?” And off you went, running. Leaves swallowed you up.

When I tried to find my way back, the brambles scarred my bare arms. I won that game in the end, with sweat and blood.

You must have felt bad for the blobs of red ink that the teacher wasted weekly on my spelling test. You taught me how to cram words onto the interiors of eraser wrappers and get full marks. In exchange, I let you copy my math homework, which evolved into a class-wide movement. You began to slap me on the shoulders and ask question after question for my one or two

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or three-worded answers.

The rain and snow came and it got very ugly. But we got Inside Days— my favourite days. The teacher got us to play Hangman. When it was my turn, I drew seven lines on the board. My classmates got A and O and U. What? What? What words end in “OU”?

“Hangzhou!” you yelled and I smiled. It was my hometown.

They said it was unfair. You came up close and slapped my shoulders and laughed horribly loud. Everything sounded different after. I think you broke my eardrums.

When I sat down, someone asked me, “Why are you so red?”

I touched my face. Warm. I said cao and wanted to cry.

In the spring, I learned to play Four Square. I stayed for lunch, sometimes.

For graduation, we went to the water park. You dumped a water bottle on me. I ran from you, with the wind slapping my face and wet grass soaking my socks. The water kept on coming for minutes and minutes and never ran out.

High school was 1200 kids packed into a crumbly yellow building and six portables. I made new friends in Math 8 Honours: immigrants and international students. In Truth or Dare, they asked for my past crushes. I thought of you. I said a girl’s name.

We shared no classes. I played bhabhi at lunch and debated calculus problems with my friends. You did breaking and weed. I walked into the washroom once, and you were there, eyes half-shut in soft, red smoke. I washed my hands and left, then went to another washroom on a different floor. We grew into not knowing each other.

You worked in the cafeteria. At lunch, you scooped the soup of the day into a paper cup, then sealed it with a plastic lid. Once, I bought soup with a toonie. The soup burned my fingers when you handed it to me, leaving a band of red marks. You did that with your bare hands, for a whole semester.

The soup was purple and contained unnamed cubed substances. I never went to the cafeteria again, but I still used your cheating techniques for English. I still heard you laugh in the halls. Too far away to be sure, though.

I remember, one morning, going to school. Yellow police tape around the fields. Red on grass. And a name. A name echoing in the air. Many people

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have that name. But it seems to me that only you could have that name, there and then.

You sat with him for some hours in the dark after you cracked his head with a plastic hockey stick. That’s what they said. No one died. But I never saw you at school again.

The yearbook held white teeth and baby photos and me, looking very mature and very done. You eluded all cameras.

I remember searching for custody centres in the area and got three red dots on Google Maps. I remember zooming out and scrolling right to check out Toronto. How the snow fell and the years blurred.

I flew here to study actuarial science. On March 25th, Line 2 stopped working at around 3 p.m. at Victoria Park.

Someone threw themself onto the tracks. They mentioned hours of delay.

I went out of the station to find a quiet place to call my boyfriend, so he could search for new routes for me. I had no data myself.

There you were on the stairs, with your head toward the sky and a phone against your ear. You wore a black hoodie and half a beard. A red dot, cigarette, lit between unmoving lips, amidst wet snow and wind.

Before I knew it, before my eyes could focus and be sure, there was only wind. The train restarted. I headed downtown and began a journal entry.

Almost home now.

All the while, that feeling: walking and walking and suddenly not remembering where you’re going. Somewhere itchy and achy and sweet?

I’m remembering how I see colours sometimes when I stare into sunlight— poppings of green and red and gold—and feel a sudden burn on my fingers and a soft ringing in my ears.

It’s weird. All these years, I rarely think of you, but I never forget.

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ELAINE XIAO

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The Weaver C. KATHLEEN ZHAO CW: Bodily harm, death

Qingyu was embroidering spiders onto the back of her shoes when a mouse leapt out of the undergrowth. It stuttered to a halt, paralyzed, to find itself in the open space before the veranda of Teacher’s house. Delicate red threads floated from its fur, turning gently in the air like ink freshly fallen into water. They grew transparent a few handspans away from the mouse’s body, but she could see the extended length of them if she concentrated.

When one of the threads pulled taut between the mouse and the forest behind it, Qingyu saw images dance along its line. She put down her shoe and reached out.

Teacher’s hand came down around her wrist. His appearance broke her focus; she had thought him on the other side of the house.

A fox shot out of the green in a blur of orange and white. The mouse squealed, its paws scrabbling against the dirt as it tried to flee, but the fox caught the thrashing rodent in its jaws and shook. The threads of life stretching out from the mouse’s body sparked bright and snapped, fading as they fell limp. Qingyu pulled herself free of Teacher. The fox gave them only a cursory glance before it ambled back into the woods with its prize.

“Qingyu,” said Teacher. His smile was wide and thin. He had not bothered to wear his blindfold today, but she had grown too used to the empty sockets of his eyes to shiver. “Were you going to help that creature?”

“I pitied it.”

“How would you have saved it?”

Qingyu picked up the shoe she’d been working on and hunted for her sewing needle so she wouldn’t have to look him in the face. She knew her

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answer would dissatisfy him, but lying was pointless. She found the needle in the crease between two floorboards. “I was going to pull it toward me. Away from the fox.”

He sat down beside her, sprawling languid against the panelled floor.

“You made two mistakes just now. The first was your lack of subtlety, finesse, and imagination. You can’t force your way to the simplest solution without regard for consequence or detail. How would you have explained yourself if someone had seen you pull the mouse toward you? Your second mistake was trying to interfere without sufficient justification. Whether the mouse died or the fox starved does not affect you. Why risk exposing yourself to defy an insignificant moment in the hierarchy of nature?”

It was impossible to tell if Teacher was angry. He said everything lightly.

Qingyu’s skin prickled anyway. “No one else is here to see. And how can I learn subtlety without practice? The more comfortable I become with control, the greater instinct I’ll develop for finesse.”

“The absence of others is no excuse for falling into bad habits. As for experience, that will come with time,” said Teacher. “For now, you must practice other things.” He leaned forward and pushed back a wide, olivegreen sleeve to rest a long finger against the outline of her half-embroidered spider. “This leg and the left eye were done clumsily,” he said. “You should have stitched them more tightly.”

She raised the shoe to the sunlight streaming through the bamboo trees for a better look. She could hardly see a difference between those stitches and the others. "Do you want me to redo them?” she said finally. The thought was exhausting.

Teacher laughed. “You should be grateful that this sort of needlework allows for second chances.” *** Two years ago, the summer Qingyu turned sixteen, she began to see the threads of the world. They shimmered into life as if they’d always been there, draping from the ceiling beams of her family home, crisscrossing the floor, tangling around the throats and limbs and organs and fingers of all living beings. She could not avoid touching them. Her skin offered only token resistance to the drag of the threads before they broke through her body and bloomed within her visions, sounds, and feelings not her own. The threads

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seared into her, the past stretching endlessly behind her, glimpses of the present as bright as snow under sunlight, and fractured smatterings of the ever-shifting future.

They were too much for one person to hold. She screamed and wept and wasted away. She recoiled from the sharp sensations and churning emotions dragged into her mind by even the briefest encounters with others. Her family’s fear, confusion, and misery gathered above their home like a leaden cloud. Their presence, once a comfort, became a familiar agony. She didn’t want to know their suppressed insecurities, unacknowledged desires, and secret despairs. No one else could see or feel the threads. They thought she was going mad, and she soon thought so too. The visions consumed her. By the time Teacher arrived, she had been reduced to an unthinking outpost through which they unceasingly passed. She lay limp and unresponsive.

Teacher silenced the threads for her. It had not occurred to her before then that they could be woven, that they could be changed and manipulated.

He braided a gossamer net out of a basin of water and stitched it against her skin to shield her senses. When she had recovered enough to process his voice, he taught her how to quiet the threads without the shield. With practice, she turned her consciousness into a gated wall. She gathered herself back together in bits and pieces in the days that followed. “You are stronger than I was, lasting those three months alone. I had gouged out my eyes by my first,” Teacher told her one morning, over a pot of tea.

“Did it help?” she couldn’t help but ask.

He laughed. “Not in the least!”

This comforted her, though she did not feel strong. The ignorant, peaceable person she’d been before the threads already seemed like a foreign creature, or a memory belonging to someone else. Now she was hollowed out, a shadow of a person. Something had irrevocably broken inside her.

By the end of the week, everything was settled between Teacher and her father. Teacher wished to take her on as a disciple as she continued her convalescence, though it meant taking her away from home. Her father agreed, and she glimpsed sorrow mixed with relief along the lines spooling out from his soul. He grieved to see her go but knew it was necessary. He was ashamed of how glad he was that Teacher was leaving. Teacher had saved her life, but he made everyone a little uneasy. He smiled too much at other

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people’s suffering. *** A few days after she finished her shoes, they began to travel again.

Teacher wanted to go to the eastern mountains to visit the shrine of a dead person Qingyu had never heard of. He lectured her on the world as they walked through it, showing her how to discover the history of towns and cities. He guided her through finding and plucking the threads braided along the roads, buildings, and statues to trace the echoes of time and weather upon them. Breaking through the inanimate tranquility of stone and mortar to read the land was more arduous than reading people, whose roiling psyches shone so vibrant and accessible. But it was also more peaceful. Architecture felt no pain and suffered neither opinions nor feelings about the sights that passed over and under and through them. Reading their threads was like sitting in a gazebo in the middle of a windless rainstorm. You could see the torrent without getting wet.

Most people were solicitous of Teacher. He was a curiosity and a mystery: a blindfolded and well-dressed, genial gentleman, accompanied only by one young woman, inexplicably armed. Most people assumed Qingyu was his servant or a relative; a few thought her his concubine. Some tried to rob them, perhaps thinking that his blindness or her gender made them an easy target. Teacher was good at evading or distracting them without looking like he was trying to do either. Most of the time, Qingyu could not tell what thread he’d knotted or plucked or flicked to accomplish it, but he only laughed when she asked him. “Telling you would spoil the lesson,” he said.

“Pay attention and figure it out yourself.”

The further they travelled, the greater the distance grew between settlements. It was necessary to avoid others on the open road, where robbers hid in ambush and merchants no longer dared to journey unguarded. They observed the vibrations along the road’s threads as they walked, making note of who was coming and going. They always knew who to avoid hours in advance of any approach.

One day, Teacher said, “New lesson.” He tied a spare blindfold around Qingyu’s eyes and led her by the hand into the woods. An hour of walking later, he grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her round and round until she was dizzy, then removed the blindfold and said, “Which way back to the

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road?”

That was easy; she’d held her mind against the lines threading the earth the entire way. The road was beyond her senses now, but she’d tracked the threads that had spread out from it and the threads that had spread out from them. It was a moment’s work to reorient herself and begin leading them back to where they’d been.

The next day they repeated the exercise, but this time Teacher sent blank whiteness down the lines of her senses as they departed the road, cutting off her connection to the threads. She had not realized how much she had grown to depend on them. Their sudden absence set her teeth on edge; she was abandoned and diminished, snubbed and insignificant, excluded and forgotten from the conversation of the universe. She clung to the sounds of the forest, the feel of the ground beneath her feet, and what little breeze wound its way through the trees to keep herself present. Her nails dug into Teacher’s palm. She felt as though all bodily sensation would flee her at a moment’s notice and cast her floating into a sea of nothingness.

When Teacher finally returned the threads to her, the explosion of feeling was equal parts relieving and painful. She tore the blindfold from her head and inhaled great lungfuls of air. The world swam before her, shimmering with lines of life.

They had stopped in a small clearing. Teacher went to sit in the grass, his back against a mossy boulder. He mimed stitches over his hand. When the cuts closed, he wiped the blood from his palm against his robes. “I’m sorry,” said Qingyu.

He lifted a sleeve to conceal a yawn. “Can you find the way back?”

Qingyu extended her awareness as far as she was able. Worms squirming in damp coolness; the glacial, crackling expansion of growing bark; the flutters and rustles and whispers of a hundred hidden leaves, birds, animals, and insects—but she found nothing that hinted at the whereabouts of the road. She was certain that Teacher knew, but even had he permitted it, she would not have searched his threads for the answer. She had accidentally brushed up against his thoughts a few times in the past, and the feel of them reminded her of the river behind her family’s estate during winter: lifeless, clear, and cold. “No,” she admitted. She was not even sure what direction they’d entered the clearing from.

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“I’m going to take a nap. You can’t see it behind my blindfold, but I am closing my eyes,” said Teacher. “Wake me up when you’ve figured it out.”

He seemed to expect her to take a while. Qingyu walked the perimeter of the clearing, hunting for clues that did not come. Not even the position of the sun could give her a hint; the sky had grown overcast since they’d left the road. Eventually she began to walk in a spiral out of the clearing, mentally mapping out the space as she went.

The world unspooled before her in an intricate net of life and emotion.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been walking before it began to drizzle.

The sound and smell of water hitting the earth reminded her of her brother.

Chen’er had been born on a rainy morning. She remembered sitting outside the birthing room, looking through a window at the fields behind her home while her sister leaned against her. Their moment of peace had been broken by the muffled sound of the infant’s first cry. Chen’er had been two years old when she’d left with Teacher. By now he had probably forgotten her.

When the rain abated, the clouds parted for a sky going purple with approaching evening. Hunger pangs made her wonder whether she shouldn’t return to Teacher for a break. But she felt the forest grow quieter as animals shifted away from a ruckus in the near distance. There—past a grove of lightning-struck trees and at the bottom of a shallow hill, she caught the wisping echoes of human activity, a ripple in the forest’s fabric.

It took her ten minutes to reach them: two men and a woman in mismatched armour, struggling to build a fire. Their sharp, exhausted thoughts blasted down their threads in sickly bright beads. A barefoot boy in worn-out clothes sat gagged and bound to a tree. Tear tracks ran down his dirty, bruised face, and the lines emanating from his body spiked with pulses of fear. Qingyu folded the shadows around herself so they wouldn’t see her.

She examined the threads of their recent past running behind them. They’d come from the road; it was not six minutes away.

“I give up.” One man threw down a box of matches in disgust. “It’s too damp for this.”

“The rain’s been stopped for a while,” the woman observed. She had a sharp, haggard face and a bored expression. “You still don’t have a single dry one?”

“That brat kicked the box into a puddle. How could I have a dry one? I’d

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like to see you start the fire.”

“Why did you even take him?” asked the last of the three. He leaned against a tree, twirling a small, thin knife between his fingers. “Look at his clothes. You think his family can afford to pay for him? You should have taken his friend, the one dressed all fancy.”

“I had my hands full,” the first man snapped. “Maybe the rich boy wouldn’t have slipped away if you hadn’t been too busy laughing to help.”

“Stop arguing. We’re stuck with what we’re stuck with. Do either of you have any ideas on what to do with him?” The woman threw their prisoner a look of resentment.

“Who says we have to do anything?” countered the man with the knife.

“The rain’s erased our tracks. Who’s to say anyone will find him, even if they bother looking? We can leave him here and let nature take care of the rest.”

When Qingyu beckoned, the bandits’ threads drifted close. The argument drowned out the slow unsheathing of her sword. She spooled the threads thickly around the metal. When she pulled them taut, the three strangers fell silent and looked up in alarm, startled by a mental tug they did not understand.

She leapt out of the trees, the threads guiding her sword forward. She took the bandits off guard; Qingyu cleaved one man across the stomach before he could finish drawing his weapon. The woman shouted and attempted to block her next strike with her staff, but she angled it clumsily.

The blade shattered the wood and took her head from her shoulders in a single arcing sweep. The last of the three— He knelt by the tree, pressing the tip of his knife into the boy’s throat.

“Heavens and earth,” he said. His hand trembled, and face was stiff with shock and fury. “What a terrible day I seem to be having.”

Qingyu watched a dark bead snake down the boy’s neck. Tears flowed silently down his cheeks, staining his gag. His eyes skittered to and away from Qingyu, bulging with terror. Behind her, she could hear the man she’d disembowelled gasping out his dying breaths. The air tasted of iron.

“Put your weapon down,” said the bandit. The sword barely made a sound as it hit the grass. “Good. Now kick it away.”

She obeyed. “Don’t hurt him,” she said quietly.

He dug the knife in a little deeper. The boy made a choked-off noise. The

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bandit’s eyes were very bright. She saw his lips move but she was no longer listening. Her eyes traced the threads of his body. She could see every stitch— every joint and line of movement, interwoven to form the complex, give-andtake biology of a living human being. The threads floated toward her eagerly.

She twisted her fingers around them and pulled. *** The captured boy looked to be around ten years old, which made him older than Chen’er and younger than A-Ze. But neither of Qingyu’s siblings had ever looked at her the way he did when she cut him free of the tree.

He pushed her away and ran off into the woods without a word, reeking of blood, urine, and terror.

It was well past nightfall by the time she returned to Teacher. Her stomach dropped at the sight of him standing by a blazing campfire, facing her arrival with his hands tucked into his sleeves. She stopped before him, hyper-aware of the dark stains on her shoes and clothes.

“I found the road,” she said.

“Murder is not subtle, Qingyu,” said Teacher. “Not the way you’re doing it. Don’t worry, I’m not angry. That would be hypocritical, considering my own youthful experiments. But bad habits should be curtailed early. I’ll be guiding you with a sterner hand in the future.”

She swallowed. “Did you follow me?”

“You were taking a while to return, and I didn’t have anything better to do when I woke. I’m a little disappointed you didn’t notice. I even cleaned up after you.”

Qingyu flexed her fingers. They were still sticky. “You… cleaned up? But you got back here before I did.”

“Don’t feel bad,” he said kindly. “I am much older and faster than you.

Yes. I did my best to make your mess presentable. No one who finds the bodies—if they find them—will suspect that they died in the way they did. I even took care of that boy you let go.”

She stared at him, going cold at her toes and fingertips.

“Are you surprised?” he asked. “Of course I couldn’t let him go after what he saw. You would have done the same if you had any foresight. It’s fortunate that he’s illiterate. I didn’t have to take his fingers. Just this.”

He pulled his hands out of his sleeves and opened his right palm. A

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severed tongue sat at its centre, dull purple in the firelight. She stepped back, shaking her head. She tried to speak, but the words cowered in her throat, refusing to leave. Her mind was a roaring white space.

“You’re upset?” said Teacher. “Do you feel guilty?”

“It’s not—not—” she managed. She did not recognize the high, panicked breathiness of her own voice. She thought of the boy, running terrified out of her sight and into the grasp of Teacher. He couldn’t have—he couldn’t have …

“You don’t believe it’s his? Why don’t you touch it and see for yourself?”

Short, white threads waved from the surface of the tongue, like the flailing legs of a beetle on its back.

Her body revolted. Sweat dripped down her back. But it was her responsibility—her fault—so she had to know. Her hand trembled as she reached out and brushed the soft, cool threads emanating from the tongue.

Memories flashed through her, dulled by time and death: the tang and rough texture of dried ginger, sharp comments made at friends, the agony of one’s body coming apart. The tongue was not the boy’s; it belonged to the man she’d just unravelled. As Qingyu sank to her knees, Teacher tossed the tongue into the fire and laughed. *** In the morning they parted ways. “I will always be grateful for everything you’ve done for me,” she said, “but I can’t accompany you to the shrine. I can’t continue travelling with you. We see things—far too differently.”

He should have exploded at her, beaten or cursed her. He had saved her life, sheltered her, and shared his secrets with her. Her duty to him was only second to that which she owed her parents. He was within his rights to lose his temper at being insulted with abandonment.

But Teacher said nothing. He smiled as he walked away, as though she had made a wonderful joke. She watched his back retreat for a while before she turned and went in the opposite direction, feeling uncertain and unbalanced.

She went off the road before she stopped to eat lunch that day. As she sat cross-legged under the thick, ropey trunk of a dawn redwood tree, picking at a mantou bun gone hard and dry, a motion in her peripheral caught her attention. A grey mouse peeked out at her from under a wide fern, whiskers twitching. Its eyes were shining black beads. She tossed it a crumb of bread,

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but the movement startled it, and it vanished into the bushes.

AVA STEDMAN

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Kutsushita (靴下) PÁDRAIG T. WATSON

It was what Yuki had to do in situations like this. She went underneath the archway that led into the station, opting for the escalator, and descended as far as she could with as little movement as possible, beneath the ground.

The sun lost its grip on her and the thousands of others jockeying their way into Ikebukuro Station. If she just waited outside interminably she thought the sun would fade the back of her suit jacket to a lighter grey—it might even leave that wavering sunburst effect on her arching spine.

Yuki started walking when the first escalator down from the West Exit would take her no further. She wove through the crowd, like thread piercing in and out of a cotton-polyester blend. Advertisements and people clung tightly around her; the veil of perspiration that everyone wore on their skin through every humid summer, a layer between her and them. Yuki scanned through the swells of people as the station opened up in front of her, department stores looming in every direction. She halted on no face, instead setting her eyes on another escalator leading to where she knew she could get what she wanted. This particular area of the station, containing several of the station’s C Exits, had a French theme—as if, four stories below the surface, she could be convinced she was in Paris, taking a lengthy lunch as striking workers paraded past her on a boulevard.

She walked by a table that may have offered something appropriate but had too many people obstructing the path to it. This couldn’t wait that long.

She walked further down the corridor, against the flow at this time of day.

There were several stalls lining the right-hand side, tucked in little spaces just outside of the small faux-French food court serving green tea donuts,

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ELAINE XIAO

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“scorns,” and croissants baked around hot dogs.

Few people were paying any attention to the tables. Yuki didn’t want to go out to the alleys that threaded outwards from the East Exit or the Seibu Exit. That would only exacerbate things. Then, opportunity. She cut two people off to get to the front of her chosen table—there was rarely another option for getting where you wanted in Ikebukuro Station. Her eyes panned across the table, her head bent not for respect but so she didn’t need to look the woman manning the table in the eye. A woman she was sure was also just trying to get through her day. She knew what she was looking for, the same she always looked for. She found them, beneath the stripes and dots, the patterns, and the characters. Sheen, frilled at the top, linked together with a small plastic hook. Yuki took out four 100-yen coins and finally smiled towards the woman. She broke apart the plastic hook immediately and slipped both her shoes off in a hop-like manoeuvre. Her feet were finally reminded of coolness against the station’s tiles. Standing on one leg at a time, she peeled off the socks she’d put on that morning, carefully stepping onto the toe of her jettisoned left leather pump while she pulled off her right sock—in order not to touch the public floor with even the least-cared-for skin on her body. Maintaining her balance, Yuki gently pulled on her new socks, one after the other. Letting out a deep breath as her feet felt new again, she looked down at the frills that hit just below the bones of her ankles, at the sheer material that stretched across her forefoot and the haemoglobin red of her nail polish, subdued but visible beneath the fabric. Stepping back into her shoes, Yuki entered back into the stream to get to her train, now ready for the 57-minute ride home, but more importantly, for tomorrow.

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Mother Mary MATHEA TRESLAN CW: Miscarriage

March 5, 2022, Toronto Western Hospital A strand of hair tickles my nose like a feather duster. This is unpleasant, but my arm can’t reach up there to move it on account of the drug making my arm freeze up. Haldol: five milligrams. Turns my old bones to a sleep thick as maple syrup. This for 12 hours. Then, sometimes, a few side effects.

Robot arms and muscles that contract by themselves like the fold of a butterfly’s wing. I find myself here once a week, sometimes more. A regular metamorphosis. I take care to keep one arm steady at all times to hold my daughter, Lucy, snugly swaddled in a cream-coloured blanket.

A nurse shuffles by the waiting room and I look up, curious as to whether her path will include a stop to check on me. No such luck. I was going to ask for a fruit cup for the baby. A middle-aged woman and her daughter sit near me, deep in conversation about bloodwork and ECG results. Their bright eyes dart quickly away whenever they catch mine. People like to think that if they don’t stare at someone different, that the person might not notice their own difference. I sit in acute awareness that I look unusual: an old woman, scarred and spasming and, really, happy as a clam. Their loss, I think to myself.

I laugh, conscious that this can only augment my apparent lunacy, and remember something my husband, Charlie, used to say: that past a certain point, ageing is maturing in reverse. He used to collect parallels between the two, like lucky pennies, emitting a howl of delight whenever he thought of a new one.

Babies are pushed around in trollies; so are the old.

Babies wear diapers; so do the old.

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Babies are invisible; so are the old.

I gaze fondly at Lucy and, I swear, she winks at me.

July 7, 1977, Southampton, Ontario Charlie has taken me to his family home by Georgian Bay, where we will celebrate his birthday. I have his present wrapped in striped green paper buried between layers of jumpers in my suitcase: the new Fleetwood Mac album, which we can listen to with the siblings this afternoon. Young sunshine peeks through the heavy toile curtains, and I crinkle my whole face together with the sheer delight of it all. The secret ripening in my belly—still small enough to hold on to—this place, and the endless ways I could break the news to Charlie’s family.

Over watermelon at breakfast, for example, Charlie’s mother shouting over solemn voices on the CBC. Charlie grinning proudly with a seed stuck to his front tooth. Or in the evening while Charlie's father plays the piano, practising a new lullaby for the grandchild he keeps asking for. In the garden, over tea. While Charlie’s mother is cooking. During an evening walk on the beach. Every situation seems just right for sharing such perfect news. I feel so glad I could shatter.

I roll on to my back to stretch, and the liquid in my bladder settles between my hips, urging me to rise. A searing ache in my belly threatens to spill it. It’s only been six weeks, and this baby is already in control of every move I make.

I tiptoe down the hall to the toilet, careful not to wake Charlie, and hike up my nightgown. *** The crickets hum. Charlie lays with his eyes closed on the plaid blanket, unmoved by the breeze. I nuzzle my head beneath his chin. His hand reaches for my belly and I feel the muscles in his jaw shift against my crown as he smiles. A lump rises in my throat and I almost let myself cry. I almost let myself be comforted, caressed, coddled. Instead I am quiet. I feel my stomach rise and fall. I will do anything not to tell Charlie. Anything to leaf through the baby name book he bought me, “Lucy” highlighted in green. She will come back, or grow again, or I will give birth to a giggling little ghost baby, powdered and perfect. I can already feel the warmth of a tiny thumb pressed

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to my palm, and I know she still exists. This baby is still inside me. She has to be.

October 12, 1977, Toronto, Ontario Charlie has stopped touching me at night, and in the mornings he tries to undo all of the progress I’ve made on the nursery. I’ve painted about half of the east wall in a sweet pale pink I bought on sale at Woodward’s, and he insists on hiding what’s left of the paint in the garage where he thinks I won’t find it. When I confront him, he tells me it’s too early, that we don’t know the sex yet, and that if I let him take me to the doctor, maybe they’ll be able to tell us. I tell him, for the hundredth time, that I like going to the doctor alone, and that they already told me our baby is a girl. Lucy. Charlie looks like he’s going to cry again.

It’s okay, sweetheart. He inches towards me as if trying to catch a mangy dog.

Just let me help you, let me take you to the doctor. They might be able to tell us why you aren’t showing yet.

I tell Charlie not to be silly, that it’s time for my afternoon nap. I nap often these days. It’s good for the baby. In our bedroom’s flowery wallpaper, I watch Lucy leap and tumble like a woodland nymph blessing the bluebells.

I’m worried about Charlie. I heard him on the phone with his mother yesterday morning while I was still dozing, and he was crying about something. He never used to cry. He kept saying Mary, Mary, it’s Mary. He’s so erratic these days. And to think I’m the one with the pregnancy hormones.

I always thought that by now, Charlie’s mother and I would be shopping for baby things together. She rarely visits. The last time she was here, I asked her if she wanted to feel the baby kicking, and she just looked away and said that she was late for an appointment. I hope everyone starts behaving properly once Lucy comes.

For now, I lie in bed next to Charlie and plant kisses along his spine, which is habitually turned towards me. I whisper to him about how lovely our baby will be. When he tells me to stop, I do. I crawl inside my own spine and plant kisses there instead. I’ve spent dozens of nights curled up like this, wishing for Charlie to come back to me. Tonight, a warm and surprising feeling envelops me as I realise that I’ll be okay if he doesn’t. I don’t need

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Charlie. I only need my girl.

I fall asleep to the musical patter of Lucy’s tiny feet along the inside of my skull.

MISSING WOMAN FOUND INSIDE LIGHTHOUSE, COMMUNITY SEARCH CALLED OFF SOUTHAMPTON—Thursday, December 29 1977—Mary Jessome, who disappeared from a Palmerston Street residence on Sunday evening, has been safely located inside the Chantry Island Lighthouse, where she sought refuge from Wednesday’s storm after wandering away from her family. The community-wide search for the 28-year-old woman has been called off.

Mary’s location was discovered by local woman Simone Miller, who reported seeing a lone figure on the island from her veranda by the main beach. While investigating, local authorities found Mrs. Jessome alone in the lighthouse keeper’s cabin. It is unclear how Mrs. Jessome entered the lighthouse, which was locked. She only had a cloth doll in her possession, and sustained no injuries during her disappearance. Foul play is not suspected. The Jessome family declined to comment on the event, except to say that Mrs. Jessome is grateful to all those who searched for her.

June 19, 2005, High Park, Toronto A medley of children pile on top of a faded picnic blanket. Birthday cake time! Everyone pick up your plates! A father and mother in their early thirties distribute slices of vanilla confetti cake to grabbing hands, as a young girl chews expectantly on a watermelon rind. She doesn’t much like cake, preferring the crisp taste of fruit. Abigail, save some melon for your sister. It’s her birthday. Play with your doll. The girl licks the last drops of juice off the rind and sets it down. Out of the corner of her eye, on another picnic blanket close yet distant, a baby lies still in the sun. Or is that a baby? A woman lies beside it and speaks to it. Slowly, cooingly. The girl is intrigued, being still of the age at which motherhood is an acceptable form of play. She picks up her doll and walks to the unfamiliar blanket, where the woman is enjoying the festive atmosphere, carried over by the breeze. And here is this young fugitive, who has come to say hello. The child giggles and picks up the woman’s doll in her other arm. The woman cradles the doll’s head so as to protect it from

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childlike laxity, and chuckles to herself. It has been quite some time since she’s interacted with a child other than Lucy.

Nearby, the young girl’s parents notice her disappearance and call for her return. The mother rolls her eyes and snaps at her husband. I told you we should have moved to the suburbs before we had kids. There goes our fiveyear-old, cavorting with a stranger in the park. The girl’s father laughs and makes a waving motion with his hand, as if to swat away his wife’s concerns.

I’m sure she’s harmless. And besides, they’ve got dolls in common.

A mourning dove coos in the trees. It is the happiest day the solitary woman has spent in years.

June 19, 2005, Southampton, Ontario Charlie Jessome sorts through his dead parents’ attic reluctantly, as anyone disappointed to part with a great old house might. But the market is hot right now, and his siblings are hankering after the influx of cash for RESPs and braces. Among boxes of his mother’s old quilting supplies are various photos from over the years: the three siblings as children, various wedding photos, and one which makes him squint a little more than the others. It’s a group photo from the summer of ‘77, and in the back, Charlie stands with his arm around a thin woman grinning in an oversized crewneck.

Mary. How long has it been now, 28 years? His lifetime has doubled since Mary was that grinning, clever girl. And how have the past 20-odd years been for her? Charlie winces and reminds himself, as he does a few times a year, that he did all he could. That the medication only made her miserable. That romantic love, the kind he had for Mary, wasn’t made to withstand that kind of illness.

Charlie remembers his father’s warnings after Mary disappeared that December, his booming insistence that this wouldn’t be the first little field trip Mary would embark on. And what’s he supposed to do, pretend that doll is his grandchild for the rest of his life? There has to be a line. Not everyone stays married anymore. Just look at the Johnstones.

Charlie shakes his head to bring himself back to the present: the evening sun filtering through the skylight, the gulls screeching above it, and the tedious sentimental task set out before him.

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March 5, 2022, Toronto Western Hospital They’ve finally moved me and Lucy to a bed for the night, albeit a rock hard one, and I try to let go of the day’s stresses as I curl my long body around my daughter’s small one. Poor child, spending another day in a hospital waiting room like that. She’s so quiet, my Lucy. No baby is quite so good. Tomorrow she deserves a trip to the park, where we’ll watch the family of swans float by. Maybe share an ice cream.

Perhaps we’ll play that we’re rich and important. Visiting dignitaries or far-flung royals, taking in the local sights. However much fun we have pretending, I’ll always make sure Lucy knows that life with her is better than any fantasy. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and my smile stretches against the top of Lucy’s head. Her sweet baby’s breath mixes with mine on the pillow we share, and I know that this is as good a home as any we’ve had together.

We’ve nothing left to lose but each other.

I fall asleep to Lucy’s voice lulling each of my organs to sleep, swimming cutely through my veins in graceful strokes. Sometimes I don’t know where she ends and I begin. That night, I dream we’re on a beach, building a proud old lighthouse in the sand. I shield it with my body so the tide can’t reach it.

Love covers us both like the sun’s gentlest rays.

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ELAINE XIAO

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To Walk on Floors of Gold BRONWYN BRENNAN CW: Overdose, blood

I have come to believe that life operates in a series of patterns. In my opinion—though often poorly constructed and loosely inspired from writings of more brilliant and interesting men—life moves in fours. Perhaps context is required to justify this peculiar philosophical derivation: today marks my fourth year at TD in downtown Toronto, where I work in the accounting department. I was born in Toronto, and I have stayed in this city my whole life. I suppose that many would regard my commitment to stagnancy as an exhibit of a man bound to the mundane. In truth, this wouldn’t be far removed from my life’s reality, or better, my mere existence.

I am the man you pass on the street with his head down, moving quickly, but never too quickly. The background character sitting alone in the coffee shop on York Street which you happen into with your friend. I am the man in the old hoodie and sweatpants in your dentist’s office. I am always there, but never in sight. I fill up the background landscape so that emptiness can never overwhelm the foreground. I am a filler character, and I am okay with that.

Life moves quickly, and in my static state, time fights to keep its meaning. When days seem to become replications of those past, life becomes circular. There’s no worry about having too much, or too little. Four months ago, I found myself removed from reality. My wife, Sarah, said it was called dissociation. A disconnection from current affairs to the point where one is absent. Time passes, though. Even if you aren’t aware.

Every morning I wake up at 6:01 a.m. so that I can grasp onto that extra minute of pure, peaceful slumber, where empty black dreams keep me free,

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even for just one extra minute. I then shower for 10 minutes, and though Sarah’s work starts at 9 a.m. across the street from our apartment in North York, she wakes with me. While I am in the shower, she brews coffee and cooks bacon and eggs. We move in silence. Though recent months have left me unaware of nearly everything that surrounds me, mornings with her are my pockets of peace for the day. It seems that we have almost become two cogs; in order to avoid collision, we move in precise and exact movements. In the midst of our mechanical shifts, I leave my delirious fog. Sarah clears the clouds that congest my senses. She sees the world so much differently than I do. If she was a colour, she’d be a lilac, a lavender that never overpowers your senses, never overwhelms your vision. She is gentle and intelligent. Funny and ever-patient. In these mornings, in our uniform silence, I nearly cry knowing that this peace is finite. By 7:15 a.m., she kisses me goodbye and, as if a man lucid from a dementia driven slumber, I leave her vanilla scented warmth and return to my blurry and muffled reality. I am drowned in the speed at which the outside world passes me by, as if I was no more than a rat on the subway tracks.

The cold bites at my neck as I step outside our apartment building. There is no snow, it is -11° Celsius, and the sky is grey. The grass is brown, and I move into the sea of people ushering themselves into Sheppard-Yonge subway station, all eager to escape the nip of the cold air by finding sanctuary in the underground tunnels. My briefcase bounces against a woman’s leg. She says something to me angrily, and loudly, but I don’t know what she says. In my state, I sometimes can’t hear anything all day—though more often than not, I go the entire day without conversation until I return home to see Sarah.

Today is Wednesday, January 10th. I have a presentation to give at 10 a.m. This weekend Sarah and I will go see a movie. While I sit and wait for my train to come, I give myself reminders that I do in fact exist outside of my own head.

Sometimes I forget that. Sarah says this is a dangerous thing.

I know it is too.

Today I will present my data to the accounting department heads, as I do so on the second Wednesday of every month. Truthfully, I am under no emotional strain for this event, despite the fact that I would soon stand in front of a jury of accountants. In fact, judgemental events such as this

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would typically cause me anxiety or stress, but in my current state, few things seemed to affect me at all. In any case, despite my unwavering disconnection to everything that surrounded me, I instinctively removed a sheet of paper from my briefcase. In 12-point font, with equal margins in Times New Roman, I glazed my eyes across the words I had written late last night: Hello, everyone. My name is Steven Michael, and I am in the risk management sector of our accounting department. Today’s charts will assess last month's earnings and losses, while discussing the impending recession, and the unfortunate likelihood that we will have to downsize.

Downsize. I read that word over. The funny thing about being in the risk management sector was that I was the man who discovered all of the ‘unfortunate likelihoods,’ and while some may assume that this role would provide me protection from misfortunate events such as severance, my presentations of these looming adversities only gave me warning of what could potentially happen if my analysis were correct. And truthfully, if my analyses were incorrect, then I might also be fired; what good am I if my predictions of impending potential risk were inaccurate? I was no safer than anyone else in the lower half of the company’s totem pole. Like the rest of my coworkers, I was expendable. Hidden in our grey cubicles, which on one office floor, were lined up in four columns and seven rows, we looked identical and, truthfully, were identical. The floors repeated from floor three to thirty-three; and at thirty-four, thirty-five, and thirty-six, lay the offices of the men and women who controlled our fate. And in the building next to ours, which was just as grey and concrete, the same cubicles could be seen from our windows, the same hierarchy repeated, and the same totem pole to be climbed, everyone scampering over the person beside them, like rats fighting against their own for one morsel of success to prove that the struggle was worth it. We all sought the same thing: to find the blue sky that hides far above the grey clouds that close in on our lower levels. At the top you get to see the sun again. Above that, only heaven lay. Maybe the closer you get to the top of the tower, the closer you find God. Sometimes I wished I knew how to get there. In my heaven, I would never leave my mornings with Sarah. I would never be alone, and I would never be forgotten. Just me and her, in our impenetrable silence, our private sanctuary would be infinite and untouched. How hard the world becomes when you find the things that you

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cannot keep in their precious, unaffected, natural state.

Lost in thought, I hadn’t realised my train’s arrival in the station.

“Line One. Southbound,” a woman’s automated voice called out from the train speakers. I stood up and moved myself into the train with some effort. I found a seat near the middle of the train against one of the windows, and I felt my body drift into an uneasy slumber.

After some time—the exact amount I would never be able to recall—I felt my body move against its will, some force shoving into it with an assertion I had scarcely felt before. My eyelids lifted strenuously into a hazy observation of a dishevelled man who was presently looming over top of my slumbering body. He was wearing brown Sorel boots which were pretty badly beaten up, a pair of black tattered sweatpants, a yellow raincoat stained with a muddy substance, and a brown beanie with a rip at the top. His face was old and cracking. A dirty white beard hid some of the lines on his cheeks, and his eyes, his brilliantly green eyes, stared down at me with a ferocity that shook my soul. His appearance was jarring, and it removed me, for the first time in a very long time, from my dissociative stagnation. The man was clearly intoxicated, but it was equally as evident that he was eager to speak with me.

We stayed silent for a moment, each of us observing the other.

You’re a sick fuck, he slurred. He said this in a level tone, as if he were simply asking when the next stop was. I stared at him, unsure of how to react to this peculiar interaction.

Mr. Fucking Suit, does it allllllll and does nothing, but you never know what’s below you only what’s above you….. you, you—it is allllll you and your fucking fault, you did this to ME! He screamed, finally breaking his steady composure.

I tried to ignore him, but I couldn’t break from his gaze. There was something familiar about him, something so uncannily familiar that it felt as if I was looking at a person I had known my whole life, but never once spoken to. The subway began to slow.

Nothing to say, huh? He slurred, as his body swayed with the train’s motion. Typical. You’re not EVEN THERE ARE YOU—and with this volcanic eruption, he punched me hard in the face right as the subway doors opened.

My hands leapt to my head, a subconscious reaction to protect my face from another blow, should there be one. When I pulled my hands away to see

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where the man was, he had left, the doors had closed, and the subway had started to move again. I looked around the subway car to see the reactions of my fellow commuters, but no one seemed to be remotely aware that anything had happened. It was as if I had imagined the whole thing.

The stops leading up to mine moved so rapidly that it felt as if I was outside of my own body, looking down at my shell-shocked self as the train moved at a velocity too high for earth’s gravitational capacity. Finally, my train came to my stop, and I methodically arose from my seat, and robotically wandered out of the train car into King station. I found my way out of the station onto King Street where floods of people were moving at the same rapid pace I had experienced in the train. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t breathe. I could see myself getting pushed and hit by men and women in grey suits as they ran into their grey buildings. I felt like a flower in a tornado.

Soon their speed became so great that I was pushed into moving onward, uprooted from my position and forced to follow their forward trajectory. I didn’t even realise I was walking until I made it outside my building. In a daze, I stared at the revolving doors.

I couldn’t go in—not yet, anyways. I was too removed from reality that if I had encountered any conversation at that moment, I would have gone mute.

Instead, I walked behind my building into an alleyway which backed onto a small parkette that had one bench and one tree and one bush and one person: me. These four things, myself included, created an unnerving scene.

There was no brightness in this parkette. The buildings which dominated the parkette left its body in a permanent shadow. The tree, the bush, and the graffitied bench all stood in weak, battered states. Now, with my own body melting into this worn-out park bench, we completed a picture so gloomy that not even Edgar Allen Poe would have supposed to write about our disposition. I let myself sit there, hunched over, unaware of my own body.

The wind was cold, and it hurt the bruise which was beginning to form in the place which I had been hit, but I did not care about the pain. I embraced it. Minutes passed, and then an hour. Finally, I had spent long enough in this position that my body began to ache with desperation to move. The cold dug into my shoulders, froze my expression, and tore at my muscles. It felt as if everything in my body was begging me to find warmth, but I was

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stuck. More minutes passed, and I wondered if I would die here, on this park bench, in my suit, under the watchful glare of BMO and TD. Looking up to the sky above me, the clouds separated for a moment, and the sun spilled out from above. A small, too fine ray of sunlight beamed down onto my face.

The warmth bore past my frost-bitten pores and radiated into my bones.

Despite its size, this ember of light exacted such a powerful sensation that I immediately awoke from my daze. Yellow light lit the decaying grass beneath my shoes, and I saw colour for the first time in a while. I wished Sarah could see this, I thought to myself.

I groaned as I stood up and realised the impact which my frozen position had held on my body, even though it had only been an hour and a half.

My bones ached, and my skin was tight. The pain of the bruise on my face was amplified as the wind whipped through its abrasions. I was aware of everything, and my eyes were no longer hazy. I checked my watch. 9:45 a.m.

My presentation was in 15 minutes.

I rushed into the office and into the elevator. I pressed the button for the 27th floor, and felt the elevator rise steadily. When I arrived at my floor, I hurried past my coworkers and into my cubicle. I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk and placed my briefcase inside, removing my presentation sheets just before doing so. I then re-locked the drawer and took my papers with me to the men’s washroom. A few other men were inside, but no one seemed to acknowledge my presence. Looking in the mirror, there was a massive cut on my forehead and blood had stained my right cheek. Some drops had fallen onto the collar of my white shirt. I cleaned myself up as much as I could and left the washroom wondering why no one had even had a slight reaction to my injured appearance. Not even an eyebrow raise was afforded to me.

My meeting was on the 35th floor, one below the top level. When I arrived at the presentation room the board of directors were already ready and waiting. The room was made of glass with gold detailing all around its perimeters. There was fresh coffee in white and gold rimmed coffee cups steaming in front of each board member. A tray of pastries sat in a trolley by the edge of the meeting room. Occasionally, a woman who I believe was one of the office assistants, would enter with more coffee and tea, pouring the steaming liquid into the cups of the members who requested refills. Even the

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pots from which she poured were glorious. Perfectly polished and so silver I could catch my own reflection from the gleam of the pot, I realised in that moment how different the upper three floors were from the remaining 33.

Little luxuries were afforded to the men in the sky. Now, standing among them, a mere guest in their glorious haven, I was more sure than I had ever been of my place in the world. I was dead even though I was alive. I was nobody even though I had a body. I was invisible even in plain sight. I commanded no attention and would never bear importance the way that the members of this table demanded. One of the men in suits ushered me over to a podium at the front of the room, barely regarding my presence in the process. He simply glanced up from his phone and flicked his hand toward the podium. I did my presentation in ten minutes, thanked the group, and then left.

Back in the elevator, I pressed floor 27 and felt the elevator descend back down. The elevator was beautiful. Like the upper floors of the building, it was designed to fit a modern but tastefully elegant art deco style. The handles of the elevator were gold, the buttons when pushed illuminated a golden glow, and the walls and ceilings were mirrors with the daintiest gold detailing swirling throughout the mirror. It was as if a paintbrush had been dipped in gold, and the impressions it made were graceful lamentations almost too faint to follow in their entire course. The doors opened at 27, and I returned to my cubicle. My cubicle was in the fourth column and seventh row of the office space, which meant that I backed onto one of the windows and had a glorious view of the grey world below, and occasionally, when the clouds parted, a slight glimpse at the blue heavens above.

As I looked out the window, I caught my reflection glaring back at me.

My face, wan with exhaustion and injury, was harrowing. The more I stared, the more afraid I grew of my own face. In my transfixion, my eyes began to bleed. Blood pooled at the corners of my eyes, and I felt a deep physical urge to blink but no matter how hard I tried to shut them, the staring contest I had engaged in was unbreakable. I felt my body close in on itself as it had on King Street this morning. After some time, how much I could not accurately recall, my co-worker Jean tapped me on the shoulder.

Hey Steve, she began. I was wondering if you could quickly sign this brief before I head home for the day?

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I looked at Jean with a sort of disillusionment that she seemed to also notice. I took the papers from her hands and began to sign.

Are you okay? Jean asked.

Yea, why? Sorry—just distracted today, I replied.

Jean nodded and said nothing more. She took the brief back after issuing a few words of thanks and then left. I checked the clock in the office and realised it was 5:45 p.m. already. Somehow, I had managed to miss six or seven hours of work.

Sarah.

I had totally forgotten that Sarah was making a fancy dinner for me tonight. She had told me yesterday, and I had completely forgotten. Worry overwhelmed my senses, and I hurried to get my things sorted so I could get out of the office.

Poor Sarah. How could I have forgotten? She’d be so disappointed in me. All I want to do is be good to Sarah. If I’m nothing to everyone, I am something to Sarah, and most days that felt as if it was the only thing keeping me alive. She was the one person who kept me sane, who loved me. To be loved is such a fragile thing, and I was a fragmented being. Though I knew few things in life, I knew that fragmentation within a person makes it harder for you to be loved. I had so many cracks and flaws and it felt as if a new crack formed every day. I was breaking apart so fast that Sarah could barely keep me together, and without her, I would surely crumble.

My chest tightened and I lost control of my breathing. I struggled to pull air into my lungs and my brain stretched and ached. My head hurt so badly, as if there was so much blood in my skull that it couldn’t all fit. These expanding blood vessels wreaked havoc in my head and as I stood up to move away from my cubicle, I tripped into the window. Grabbing hold of the window to steady my body, I saw my reflection once more. Blood was everywhere. Tears of blood fell down my face and trickled from my ears.

I couldn’t bear the sight. I needed to fix my gruesome appearance before I got home to Sarah. With all my might, I struggled back into the men’s washroom.

Reaching into my coat pocket, I pulled out a bottle of pills. For a moment I hesitated. I had already taken three this morning, way more than I was supposed to take daily. I almost did not take another, but looking at the

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pill bottle I realised it was too late to go back. These weren’t even my pills. I was lying to myself no matter what I did. I wasn’t supposed to have any, no matter the day or week. With three already floating through my system, one more was not going to reverse the damages that my routine use of oxycodone had already inflicted. Tears mixed with the blood pooling in my eyes, and in the dark dirty washroom, I fell to the floor, shaking and crying. Just a few floors above me, I would never be in pain like this—and even if I was in the same pain, at least the floor I’d be collapsing upon would be made of gold.

I fished out a bottle of water from my bag and took two pills. I drifted in and out of consciousness as the pain disappeared, and the blood returned inside of my body. I felt myself relax. I’m sorry Sarah, I thought into the abyss. Collecting myself from my momentary collapse, I left the office. The world outside was dark, but the lights above me in the towering financial district buildings were glistening, full of promise.

I liked downtown Toronto when it was night. The streets were emptier, and the skyline was lit by glass, towering, artificial Christmas trees. The lights guided me home, and the cold air refreshed me. For a moment, I was at peace.

King Station was relatively calm when I arrived inside. Being that it was now 6:30 p.m., the majority of the nine-to-five rush had already gone home, leaving two homeless men asleep on benches in the middle of the station, and three teenage boys with hockey sticks and hockey bags. The station announcement board read that the next train would arrive in seven minutes.

I turned my attention to the train tracks where a little rat was scurrying across the tracks. He scurried down away from me, and up a small railing onto the subway platform. He moved quickly, and for a moment, was unseen. Like me, he was an invisible creature scurrying to and from, just trying to survive.

I smiled to myself as I watched the rat come across a half-eaten bag of French fries left on the ground of the station floor. He began to eat, but he had attracted the attention of the teenage boys. I watched, frozen in my place, knowing too well what was soon to happen to this little rat. The rat, unaware of the attention he had now invited, was still munching on his dinner as one of the boys approached him from behind, hockey stick in tow, preparing to launch the rat onto the station tracks again.

Move! I begged in my mind, please move, please move. But of course, my

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silent wishes went unheard, and the boy flung the rat back onto the tracks with one forceful sweeping motion of his stick. His friends all began to laugh, and my body filled with rage. How hard and cold the world is! How horrible they were! Turning my attention back to the rat on the tracks, I saw he was unmoving, stunned from this attack. As he started to recollect himself, the train arrived, speeding into the station, running him over in the process.

I stood up from my place in the station and screamed with blind, hot rage. Though this rat was obviously a rat, I saw within him the world which I had begun to despise. Just when you find a moment’s bliss, some unseen force sends you into your demise. I screamed and I screamed for so long that the force of my frustration, which was mixed with desperation, knocked me unconscious, and I drifted into a deep sleep.

I wasn’t sure how long I slept on the station floor, but when I woke, white sheets blanketed my arms and body. I was wearing white, loose-fitting pyjamas, and the room I was in, unfamiliar to me, was white and clean. I drew my hands out from under the sheets and pulled the covers off softly.

There was one window in the room, and outside a soft snowfall had begun.

I wandered to the window, my socks sticking to the floor as I moved. The window was clean, and the outside world seemed untouched, so pristine that it could have been a painting. The trees had a soft blanket of snow over top of their pine needles, and the ground was covered with the same clean snow.

The sky was blue and there were a few clouds out. It was bright, but not so bright as to give one a headache. In any case, the brightness was amplified to perfection by the glistening snow below. My breath fogged up the glass.

Moving away from the window, I reassessed my new environment.

How did I get here? I wondered to myself. Where am I? There was a sink and a mirror by the end of the room just before the door, and I walked up to it to splash some cold water on my face. After my face had been washed, I lifted my head back up to view my face in the mirror. A white beard stretched down from my wrinkled skin. Green eyes peered back out at me.

I was unsettled by my own reflection. I stood there for some time, trying to remember who I was, when a nurse and another woman in her late fifties entered the room.

“Steven, how are you doing today?” the nurse asked with a warm voice.

“Looks like you’re feeling a bit better.”

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I looked at her in disbelief.

“I-I’m, I’m confused,” I stuttered.

“That’s okay, Steven, let’s sit down. We can talk it over, help you remember.”

The nurse sat me back down on the bed while she and the other woman pulled up two chairs.

“Your name is Steven Michael. You are 59 years old. You were born on November 8th, 1964. You are in Johnson Rehabilitation Centre in Muskoka, Ontario. You had an incident two days ago. You overdosed in a subway car on your way to work. You’ve been unconscious for the last 48 hours. This is your wife, Sarah.”

I looked at the woman sitting in front of me. Suddenly everything came back to me. I began to sob.

“Sarah, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean to do it again, I–I know I messed up, I’m gonna fix it, I–I will fix myself. I’ll make it better again, I promise.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks. I spoke to the floor as I couldn’t bear looking at her face. Sarah got up from her chair and held my head in her arms.

“It’s okay, you’re safe here, it’s okay,” Sarah said softly.

“I love you no matter what.”

Sarah leaned in towards me and gave me a kiss right in between my eyebrows. I closed my eyes, relishing in the love which she bestowed upon me. As she broke away, I opened my eyes to see that the outside sunlight had broken in through the windows, slashing onto the mirror which hung on my wall. The result was a kaleidoscopic effect of gold luminance that danced along the walls and twirled across the floors beneath me. Still wrapped in Sarah’s arms, with her sweet-smelling hair revitalising my soul from the brazen outside world, I realised in that moment that the floors of gold which I had fought for too long to achieve were only made of brass, and that it was Sarah who delivered my golden world.

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KAREN KAN

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About the Authors

Bronwyn Brennan is in the University of Toronto’s English program and is set to graduate in June. She grew up in an Irish family who cultivated her love for writing and literature through classic Irish poets and authors, and she has since followed the same path as her mother who is also a writer. This is her first published piece of writing, and she hopes to continue creating fiction pieces in the coming year. She is currently working on a dystopian novel and hopes to one day make a career out of her writing.

Shirley Yue Chen is a second-year English/philosophy student who enjoys petting cats and writing tragicomedies especially when she is battling a dozen deadlines. She believes that magic realism is, in reality, very real. And magical.

Nina Rafique is a first year student at Victoria College hoping to major in History with a double minor in Creative Expression and Society and Material Culture and Semiotics. She enjoys playing TTRPGs, sewing, and making art— some of which is even good!

Salma Ragheb is a visual studies and neuroscience student.

Mathea Treslan is a fourth year undergraduate student in the English and International Relations programs. She will graduate from Victoria College this Spring, before travelling to the University of Oxford to continue her studies.

She is thrilled to be published in Goose once more, and extends many thanks to her superb editor, Simona.

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Pádraig T. Watson is an MA student at OISE in Language and Literacies Education. He was born in Ontario and returned to live in the province in February 2022, for the first time since he was four. His work has appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, NōD, Abridged, deathcap, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Another North. He is currently working on his first novel about a three-piece punk band from Vancouver.

Kathleen Zhao is an English Major with minors in physics and mathematics.

She is a fan of fantasy fiction and spends her days trying to figure out how to fulfill her promise to her dentist to write a book about teeth. In her spare time, she plays video games, does amateur sketching, and ice skates (poorly).

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