Illustration by MGC

The crab trap was neon orange. He whipped it like a frisbee, far out, and watched it sink below the dark blue of the sea. It was early and he was the only one on the pier, cold in his camping chair. The old chicken bones he used as bait were stuffed in a plastic bag beside him, and he could smell them mixing with the salt of the ocean and the damp morning breeze.

One thing he liked about crabbing was that you didn’t have to wait for a tug. You could just sit there and watch the water, read a book if you wanted to, and wait however long you saw fit. Sometimes his wife would come with him and they would sit there together in the sort of silence that came from years of being next to someone. But it had been a while now since she’d joined him.

Usually, he would talk to the other crabbers. They all had the same traps as him, the ones he made. He was famous around here for that. It was a little business; he even had blue baseball caps with his company name embroidered on them in pearly white. They would talk about the weather and their grandkids and debate what bait was the best to use. It was predictable and gave him enough socializing to get by.

The only time he could really be honest with himself was when he sat out there in the quiet of the morning. Then, he could finally admit that this was never the way he saw his life going. He thought about his father wading in the ocean, the water up to his knees. That was in Malaysia, where the sea was clearer and lighter and warmer, and the sun had beaten down on their bare backs. Where he ate mangoes and coconuts from the tree. There was a photo in an old album of his wife and his father, laughing as they pried open a coconut with a machete. In that preserved moment she looked impossibly young, her smile impossibly wide. His father’s dark hair and broad shoulders captured next to her in fading sepia tones.

He thought about the chicken bones sitting now on the ocean floor like some kind of offering. When he was a child, his father was many things: a fisherman, a gifted healer. He could dive for ages, never coming up for air. Down there, on the ocean floor, his father would leave a freshly slaughtered chicken to appease the gods. He had always felt protected, held by his father’s sacrifices. That was a long time ago, and a long way from here, but sometimes when he sat on this pier, he swore for a second he could see his father emerging from between the waves. Then he would shake his head and see nothing but a buoy or the slick head of a seal.

It was funny to be back by the water when he’d spent his whole life getting away from it. For a while he and his wife had lived in Los Angeles, that desert of cars and hot pavement. He’d been taken in by all of it, the gambling and women and shiny things, until there was nothing left. He was proud of a lot of things in his life, but he wasn’t proud of that. He associated LA with death, not of any one person, but of his own upward trajectory. A plane climbing up and up and then crashing to the ground.

After twenty minutes, he slowly pulled the trap out of the water. It was a ring trap, and as he hauled it up it closed quickly, squishing the crabs inside into a mess of legs and pincers. When he opened it, the crabs sat there disoriented for a moment, then started to scuttle around on the wood.

When his granddaughter was little, he used to bring her here sometimes. When he’d release the crabs she would giggle and scream, running away from them down the pier. He would pick up the crabs and chase her, pincers out.

Now, there was no one here to chase and his granddaughter hadn’t called in months. Still, he smiled as he grabbed the crabs. He lifted them up by their back legs, dropping them in the bucket he’d brought with him.

His wife was on oxygen and could barely leave the apartment, but when he got home with the day’s catch she’d still wheel the tank to the kitchen and stand there at the stove. He’d watch her kill and clean the crabs with remorseless, practiced hands. So small and covered in purple-blue veins. The clear tube winding up her body, nubs in her nose above her unchanging smile.

The doctor had told him not to have any salt. His daughter kept reminding him of that, pleading with him. But everything tasted bland, and it didn’t feel like home. That was all he wanted these days, something that tasted like the water he’d grown up next to, that he’d spent so much of his life in.

It was funny that he’d always wanted to leave home and now he was here and all he could think about was the fact that he’d probably never go back, not before he died. And so this was it, the crabbing and the dock and an ocean separating him from his own memories. Maybe he liked being here in the morning light, alone, because he could imagine that right there, past the mountains, the water turned turquoise, and the evergreen trees turned to palms, and his own father was lying on the ocean floor with an offering clutched in his arms.

The trap flashed orange again as he threw it back out into the water. The sun was coming up stronger over the mountains now. It was still beautiful, though he realized then that it was not the sunrise he longed to see; a revelation that came from the middle of his chest like a tether to another world. He would go home in a few hours with his bucket, and his wife would make chili crab and he would hold her small hands in his, and maybe he could call his daughter to come over and have lunch with them and they would lick the spicy oil off their fingers and laugh and maybe that could be all he wanted.

Illustration by Marne Grahlman

You wake up ready for some self care. You stretch, scrape your tongue. Sit still tracking your breath. You’ve been working hard. You need a dose of freshness. What you need is a haircut, and today’s the day you booked one. How timely. As you sip the froth off your oat milk latte, you imagine yourself feeling cute, flashing your new trim to a passerby. There will be just enough wind to fluff it out. It will tumble gently over your shoulders and back. This is because your hair is long. So long that it’s usually the first thing people notice. It reaches your butt. It conceals your boobs. The colour is nondescript, but the length is remarkable.

It’s grown with you and the truth is, you’d feel exposed without it.

That being said, you’ve been spotting people with good hair and they have one thing in common: They have cuts. You could become irrelevant with your long, flat hair.

A couple weeks ago, your friend recommended someone. When you clicked on their profile, you gasped.

“You let a dude cut your hair?”

“He’s been doing this for decades,” she shrugged. “Plus, he’s cheap.”

You’re somewhat reassured, although, how could you be? Give a man full access to your hair? But you trust your friend. You book an appointment.

*

His salon is at the back of a skate shop that smells like weed. You hate weed, although you notice his hair is the same length as yours. He notices too and says “that’s dope,” which is a phrase you haven’t heard in a long time. Maybe he’s a gamer. You feel ill at ease.

“It’s sort of an identity,” you say, referring to your hair. He assures you he can totally relate and you appreciate this. You breathe easier. You tell him you want shaggy bangs framing your face. You tell him not to compromise the length – apart from dead ends, of course.

“Make me look like Stevie Nicks,” you say. “Just longer.”

He winks at you. It’s a gentle wink. You tell yourself you must be in good hands.

He fastens a drape around you and stashes your glasses. He begins to maneuver the scissors quickly. You wonder how he can be snipping so fast—it has to be a mark of experience.

You get to talking about softball and snowboarding, which are the sports he likes. He tells you about his accident, how he tumbled down a black-diamond slope and landed with the board on his teeth. They had to extract him by helicopter, he says, and after that, he got flashbacks. Vertigo, white specks all around, the thwack, a searing pain in his jaw—it wouldn’t stop. You listen as he shares that, one day, he did LSD and dissolved into nothingness and came to terms with the idea of death and the flashbacks went away. This is when you know you have made him feel safe. It’s one of your strengths.

“We’re done,” he says, undoing the drape.

You fumble for cash as he hands you your glasses—could the haircut be over so soon? Then it hits you that you were too nervous coming in, and you forgot to pay for the parking meter. You rush to your car—no ticket! This day has your name written all over it. Your head feels lighter. You set off to the YMCA. The last stop on your wellness train.

At the gym, you change into leggings and tie up your hair and—and that’s when you realize something’s wrong. Your ponytail. It’s too short. Way too short.

*

You enter a state of shock. You leave the Y. At home, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. Your hair has lost a foot. A full foot. It barely falls past your shoulder blades. You burst into tears. You take down the mirrors. You put on a hoodie and tighten the strings until you can only see a tiny patch of light, until you’re almost gone.

You text your friends. They say they are sorry for you. They say it will grow back. They send you links to hair accessories. But you are not ready for this. Your head is full of his hands lifting your hair away, pulling down your pyjamas, groping inside you. You’d been sleeping. That’s why you hadn’t heard him come in. You didn’t even know his name, actually—he was your roommate’s date. Supposed to be.

“Shh,” he said, something wet and warm spreading over your bare butt.

You are losing ground. You tuck yourself under a blanket and cry. You know you are blowing this out of proportion, but this haircut is too short, it doesn’t cover anything.

Your apartment’s gone cold. You want a drink. You want to be surrounded. You want to be left alone. You want to be rocked and told that you’re beautiful anyways. You yank the blanket over your head and wedge it under your body. You wonder how long it will take.

The ropes at the bottom of my macramé pot-hanger are frayed. Not on-purpose frayed. Just unravelling. The fern, the one I planted only a few months ago, is growing more on one side. It greedily reaches for the window even though the sunlight is inconsistent. Today is the first day that I watered it without needing to race down my Ikea step ladder and mop overflow from the fake birch table. I don’t want the veneer to peel. It already has a ring from that time I didn’t use a coaster.

The dead bird on the ledge outside my window is missing its head. It won’t decompose. It’s been there for months. Before, there were two decapitated birds out there. Now there is only one. I thought a crow ate their heads. But once I was walking in the parking lot behind my building and I almost stepped on a bodiless bird head. It was a different species than my headless birds. Winnipeg is a tough city. Even for wildlife.

In the past, I don’t think I would have paid much attention. But these days I do because a tarot reader alluded that my baby’s soul is in the woodpecker who visits the trees behind my building every morning. At least that’s how I understood his words. I tell my baby to eat her breakfast as she slams her head against the trunk, searching for insects. I say, good morning, baby. Eat your breakfast. Usually, I don’t see her. Mostly, I just hear her tapping.

I’m waiting for the woodpecker to release my baby’s soul so she can come back to me. My girlfriend stares at me, failing to hide her concern, every time I tell her about it. But mostly we avoid eye contact. She doesn’t look up from her phone as we drink coffee in silence, me listening for my baby to tap against the tree. She puts her AirPods in so she can pretend she doesn’t hear me reminding my baby to eat her breakfast.

I should say “our” baby, but I don’t want to.

Sometimes Wendy drinks her coffee in her home office. She closes the door, which is fine by me. The apartment is spacious. But Wendy complains that it’s cluttered because I refuse to throw away anything that my baby ever touched. Stale boxes of arrowroot cookies remain open in the small pantry. Her teething ring is in the freezer next to a bag of frozen peas. “Let me put it in the storage locker,” Wendy begs, gesturing to the infant pod we used to click into the back seat of our CR-V. But I cut her a dangerous glare and she drops the subject. The brackets that anchored it are still in the car. I won’t let her take them out either.

I hear Wendy typing on her laptop in the office. I’m angry when she does it because she’s making a spectacle of moving on. Of working as though nothing is wrong. Besides, her noisy typing makes it harder for me to hear if my baby is eating her breakfast. I’m afraid that my baby might think the clicking is another baby, a new, replacement baby, and then she’ll really fly away forever. In my mind, I tell Wendy I hate her. But she never responds. She just keeps typing. Writing reports about heightened cortisol levels in fish whose ponds have been polluted or some other stupidly obvious thing that her lab gets millions of dollars of funding to “research.”

I can’t move from the “birch” table until my baby has eaten. Which means sometimes I sit here, waiting all day. Wendy emerges every now and then to use the toilet or eat lunch and either sighs in my direction or ignores me completely. I don’t look at her at all. Just straight ahead. I will her to be quiet in case my baby needs me.

My baby’s crying used to feel like a crystal chandelier was crashing to the floor. In helpless slow motion. Glass and beads delivering a devastating cluster bomb of tiny cuts all over. She exploded me with her crying. It was a tripwire to past horrors of unexpected cramps, pink water followed by endless fated clots running down my thighs at the grocery store, another failed round of IVF, and Wendy’s threats that this was absolutely the last try. My baby’s crying was the emotional shrapnel of what I previously, stupidly, thought of as trauma. I would pick her up quickly and sway her to sleep. Or place my pinky finger upside down in her mouth, her tiny tongue perfectly curling around it. Her black eyes would sparkle and I would wipe the tears from her lashes with my lips. Now, while I sit and wait to hear my baby tapping, I imagine her when she was still a human infant. I conjure the sound of her crying, so I can blow apart all over again. It reminds me that I’m inside. My own body, that is.

Today is Thursday and on Thursdays Wendy comes out of her office just before noon and puts on her own jacket before placing mine over my shoulders. Like the flight attendants tell you to do if the oxygen masks fall down from up above. If it is a good day and my baby has visited and eaten her breakfast, I slide my arms through the sleeves and zip it up on my own. If it is a bad day, I just let the parka hang on top of me. A stiff, waterproof blanket. Like the ones firefighters drape over people they’ve rescued from burning buildings or mangled cars.

We are always late. Wendy apologizes to my therapist but I don’t because I don’t care. Sometimes, after therapy, Wendy admonishes me because she says that as queers and immigrants, we have to have better manners than everyone else. “We’re representing a lot of groups of people,” she says. I just stare out the windshield and ignore her.

On those days, she chatters to herself to feel less awkward. Mumbling something about “immigrant time” and making a good impression. She talks to me as though she’s somehow possessed her mother’s body and I’m a child version of Wendy herself. Because my girlfriend is second-generation, so what does she care about immigrant time? Her parents came here before she was born. Her dad owned a Tim Hortons franchise and her mom worked at the IGA. And even though technically I guess I am an immigrant, I was sent over as a toddler, so I don’t know anything about Korea. Wendy doesn’t either. But she has no excuse. Her parents aren’t white.

Today, we are only a little bit late. “How are things this week?” the therapist asks, looking at Wendy even though I’m the patient.

“Not much change from last week, unfortunately, Dr. Evans.” Wendy is very polite. To Dr. Evans, she is very polite.

“Again, please call me April.”

They talk about names and doctorates for a while and I stare at the wooden duck on the bookshelf.

Back when we first got together, we inherited a pair of wooden ducks from Wendy’s friend who got divorced. Wendy had never heard of Korean wedding ducks and didn’t believe me until I Wikipediaed them to prove that they’re a thing. I told her the set we inherited were lesbian wedding ducks because both of their bills were tied closed with string and I thought that only the female duck’s mouth was supposed to be sealed. Her silence a symbol of her matrimonial submission. But then we read online that sometimes both Korean wedding ducks have their bills bound so it wasn’t gay after all. We laughed about how apparently there are no gays in Korea anyway.

“Are you feeling tired, Maggie?” I don’t immediately react at the sound of my name. Then, I shake my head no, but just barely.

“She’s always catatonic.” Wendy speaks on my behalf. She squeezes my hand to prove that she’s a sympathetic partner. I want to pull my hand away but then Dr. Evans will write something down in her file.

“So, perhaps we have found a good balance.” I deduce she is talking about my SSRI dosage. It doesn’t sound like a question but like she’s talking to herself.

“Sure,” I say at last. Wendy squeezes again, this time harder, as though chiding an insolent child.

We sit in silence for a long time. “April” attempts to make fake-worried expressions but her face is full of Botox so she looks ridiculous.

She hesitates. Then: “And the birds? Do you still see the birds?”

I glare at her. She’s acting like I’m faking it.

“One of the bird bodies is still there. The landlord says it’s not his responsibility to remove it.” Wendy fills in when the silence becomes too awkward for her to bear. Then she adds, as though hesitating, “The woodpecker still comes around nearly every day.”

“How does that make you feel?”

I can’t tell if she is talking to Wendy or me. So I wait. Everyone looks at me.

“Good,” I volunteer.

“Great! Good! Yes, why does it make you feel good?” April’s voice is excitable in contrast to her frozen face.

“Because soon my baby will come back. The bird will release her soul back to me.”

I sense Wendy holding her breath. She and April exchange “uh oh” looks. I go back to staring at the duck on the shelf. April is whispering something about adding an antipsychotic to my nightly regimen. “It will help activate the anti-depressant.” Wendy is nodding, conspiratorially. She asks some obnoxious questions in a foreign language. They shut me out with their scientific jargon.

I think “I hate you” on rhythm with every beat of my pulse. It is slow, so it’s a mantra. I tap my fingers on the arm of the chair to express my impatience. No one notices me.

I open my eyes, which maybe were closed. I can’t remember. We’re back in the car. I turn on the seat warmer even though it’s not that cold yet.

“She might come around less, once winter arrives.” Wendy warns me like I’m stupid. Just because I don’t have a PhD in biology or whatever doesn’t mean I’m completely ignorant. “Woodpeckers go where the food is.”

“She’ll be back.” I am firm.

At the apartment, Wendy hangs our coats up and I sit on the couch by the window. It overlooks the visitors’ parking lot. I sit with my legs folded under me like I’m a cat. It’s colder near the window because it is an old building. It is okay because it reminds me that I’m inside my body. That my organs haven’t entirely detached from my skin. That I’m still somehow here even though I wish I wasn’t. Dr. Evans and Wendy want me to expose the things in my head, but I am just trying to hold my body together.

Wendy goes back into her office after eating some raw egg on leftover rice. She doesn’t offer me any. She knows I’ll say no. “I’ll pick up your prescription from Rexall after four,” she says and closes the door. I’m relieved to be alone.

I think back to when my baby was learning to sit up. We propped pillows all around her in case she tipped backwards. If she dipped too far forward, I would catch her. Once I caught her with a kiss, her wet mouth against my smiling lips. A string of saliva stretched between us as I angled her upright again.

She laughed and said “Ummah” and I looked at Wendy for confirmation.

“She’s just mumbling nonsense words,” I remember her saying.

Nowadays it’s hard for me to sit upright. My head feels too heavy. My neck too brittle. Like the single sunflower that grows in the alley out back. Every October, the sunflower collapses in on itself. Its face bows almost to the pavement, several feet below where it once blossomed. It dies crumpled to the ground, the flower part eventually ripped off by a passing car or buried in ice and snow.

My head is tired. I took a lorazepam before therapy when Wendy wasn’t looking. Then I took two more on the car ride home because Wendy was listening to a true crime podcast and I didn’t want to hear it. Now, my head is bobbing forward while I look out the window. Like my baby’s head bobbed forward before she kissed me and called me Ummah. Like my baby’s head bobs forward when she eats her breakfast.

Suddenly, I see a flash of black and white. A wisp of red. My baby swoops right by the window and perches on a telephone pole only a few metres from the building. I try, carefully, to lean forward to get a better look. To see if she is okay. I try to focus my eyes, but it’s difficult. She looks small. Like she’s lost weight. She pokes at the telephone pole but she won’t find anything there to eat. “Go to the tree and eat your lunch, baby,” I call to her. Through the office wall, I hear Wendy’s typing slow to a stop.

Before I can instruct my baby again, my head falls forward. Fast. It is too heavy. It crashes against the window pane. I hear Wendy’s desk chair push back. I hear her office door swing open.

“Holy fuck, Mag,” she mutters, rushing toward me. Blood is streaming down my face. It reminds me of when I used to be able to cry. My cheeks feel warm and it is comforting. I haven’t cried for many months. Dr. Evans’ words, “a good balance,” repeat in my mind. I imagine my head and face are red, like my baby’s is now. Wendy is blotting my forehead with a dishtowel. It doesn’t hurt. She is scared but is trying to act confident and calm. And everything I see is tinted red because I have blood in my eyes.

I look out the window but my baby has flown away. I scared her away. Inside I am screaming for her. I panic. Imagine myself chasing after her into the sky. But instead, I just close my eyes and let the blood come.

Illustration by Aya Altilbani

Each time I visit, he tells me the same thing: “She is small; don’t sit on her.” My brother Jesse has mental problems. He’s twenty.

“Time is a sign for some. A policy. For some it means nothing at all. Time is cyclical and behaviors evolve to maintain their biological destiny.” This is a sentence I’ve read sixteen times now. It’s a hospital magazine and I regret picking it up—its wrinkly film of sickness and anonymous shame disturbs me almost as much as Jesse’s incessant music. I notice the dead sweat and bits of bacon from someone’s lunch encrusted on the page I’m reading.

The hospital room swells with light. My brother has been here since Remembrance Day. It’s now the third of January. He’s listening to a song I never heard till he came here.

The song indicates a type of narrative masochism; suggesting the love interest is so desirable that the singer invites them to dine on their brain—which is clearly hyperbole, a daring way of celebrating desire and love, but in the setting of this antiseptic realism in which we currently tread, I find it revolting to cling to its imagery. The most used noun in the English language is “time.” The most used word my brother uses is “I.” Which is a letter. And a name. A title?

Jesse is telling me and Ma about the tiny woman who lives with him in his hospital room.

The amount of medication Jesse is on frightens me.

The tiny woman, Jesse tells us, is sitting in a small coffee cup lid. I tap Ma on the shoulder and point to the lid, which is filled with nuts and bits of licorice cut into sunflower-seed-sized nubs.

“She’s talking again,” Jesse tells us. “Shelly, come here! You have to see!” Jesse smiles down at the coffee cup lid. “She just told me how much she loves the food I make for her!”

He’s active, he’s conscious, he knows my name. But how will he ever evolve back into the younger brother I had who joked around, worked part time at Blockbuster Video, went to high school, and played road hockey every chance he could?

“I feel scared,” he says suddenly. “What if I have an elongated ejaculation and it drowns her? I’ll be put on death row.”

I ask the doctor why my brother is having these hallucinations. “What type of medication creates these visions? He wasn’t like this before, you know.”

My brother lifts his hand and looks at it, as if it’s a comet

he’s watching leave the room. I look him in the eyes and feel them quickly rinse away any emotional gauze of vulnerability.

“She’s doing laundry in my pill caps,” he says.

“Listen to him,” I tell the doctor. “He keeps talking about this micro girl living in a small hut beside his bed.”

Jesse stands up, raising his hands above his head. “She is telling me now…she says, ‘Some of the food he gives me I put in this blender, the rest I lug over here to my small bed,’ and now she is splaying herself along a box of matches which she’s fashioned into her bed. ‘It’s so nice here. I feel so lucky to have met you, Jesse!’”

My brother’s voice changes as he speaks on her behalf.

“‘He’s a giant. He made me this way,’ she is saying.”

“Oh Shelly,” he says to me in his own voice. “She loves her life this way. Could you imagine being taken care of like that? She is so very small and says she likes the food, and that she loves the tiny scraps of lint and broken socks to make clothing. She says we are to be married soon.”

“He’s been like this for two weeks?” I tell the doctor.

My mother, who speaks no English, insists I get a straight answer from her this time. “Dr. Selka, please, you have to talk to us. My mother is losing faith. She doesn’t understand what is happening to her son. Are you a mother? She wants me to ask you.”

The doctor looks at us like we’re amateur bandits bumping into one another under a parking lot’s false lighting at three in the morning.

Jesse seems more than pleased with the way his life has turned out. But he’s not the one that has to take Ma on the subway for an hour each way, sign her in and translate every word anyone says, including strangers we pass in waiting rooms.

I try to explain to Ma that Jesse is on the wrong medication. “He shouldn’t be having these thoughts,” I tell her. “He never had them before.”

Ma folds her hands into one another and places them along her chest. She shakes her head back and forth and looks lovingly at Jesse. He walks over to her and gives her a big hug and kiss. He stands her up and takes her by the hands. As they do this, music begins to play from down the hall. The song conjures up bellbottoms and disco balls and the infamous bass and guitar and the womanly vocals the brothers were known for—and of course the Boneroo Horns; all of which are completely inappropriate for the situation we are in. Despite this, we begin to bounce our heads and move as best we can in our poorly choreographed way, much like the way our family has communicated for as long as I can remember. Ma has a big smile on her face; Jesse’s long dark bangs hang down like an arm of fur. He appears to be in good spirits.

The doctor says she’ll return in a few minutes but I’m sure we’ll get a message from a nurse in half an hour that she won’t be back until Tuesday. This is the way it goes around here.

“Hi, hi, are you Jesse’s sister?”

“Hi Ronnie,” I say. He always visits my brother when I

visit. And I always say the same thing. “It’s family visit Ronnie, can you come see Jesse later?”

Ronnie nods and slithers back down the hall in his greasy slippers. Jesse seems indifferent to the interruption.

“I’m just going to speak with the nurse,” I say, and excuse myself.

Maybe I’ll go talk to the vending machine for a while—blend in.

On the long subway ride home, I tell Ma that I want to bring Jesse home but that we need to sort out his medication first. She agrees and says it’s up to me to sort it out. Of course, it is. I don’t want Jesse home in the state he’s in now, though; he must be more independent and less focused on his fantasies.

“Excuse me, but where am I?” The voice is sharp and quiet.

I turn to Ma. She shrugs.

“Excuse me, where am I? Where is Jesse?”

I look around. The voice seems to be coming from my purse. I reach in. “Ow!” Something bit me.

“Excuse me; I know you can hear me. I’m in your belongings. This is a big purse! Hello!” And now I see her face; it’s beautiful. She has black hair, green eyes, a nose ring.

“Why am I here? I fell asleep and suddenly I’m in a purse.”

I cover up my purse with my sweater.

The tiny girl keeps speaking, but at least it’s muffled.

Ma tugs at my arm to indicate she wants to go to market before going home. I ring the bell and help her up. I remind her we can’t get too much because we don’t have the cart. She nods.

It’s cold, so I put my sweater on. “I’m missing the funny shows Jesse and I watch,” the tiny girl is saying. “Plus, he gives me little pieces of chocolate from his treats. Can you please call him to let him know I’m all right?”

In my arms are tofu, celery and tomatoes. I look next to me to see that the old woman I thought I’d been shopping with is someone else’s old world parent. I scan the aisle for Ma.

“I almost lost you,” I scold.

She has spaghetti and bananas.

I take us to the checkout before we get too overloaded.

“For Jesse,” she says, and hands me a bag of Cadbury Mini Eggs.

“He eats too much of this crap,” I say aloud.

The tiny woman in my purse who doesn’t exist assures me that she appreciates the treats as well and that Jesse has a well-balanced diet and gets plenty of exercise.

I put the eggs down on the counter and smile at the cashier.

It’s sunny outside. Beautiful and gentle. Spring is here. In the morning I’ll call the doctor and ask for an update on how Jesse’s medication is working out. I’ll ask to speak to the social worker as well, to see what can be done for him after he’s released.

I poke around in my purse for a mint. The tiny woman bites my finger as I search. It kind of tickles. “You better call Jesse,” she calls up to me. “He’ll be worried sick! How can you do this to him? He’s your brother.”

The astrologer didn’t look like an astrologer. I hadn’t expected someone so young, wearing a baggy BAPE sweatshirt, sporting Vidal Sassoon bangs cut in a perfect Bézier curve that skimmed her eyebrows. A septum ring glittered at her nose, forming an isosceles triangle with the giant gold hoops that hung from her ears. Wire had been strung across the left hoop spelling out the letter S, and the right, WITCH. The only makeup she wore was a shock of matte fuchsia paint on her lips. She was either queer, or an artist, or both, and likely kinky.

We met at a tea house in Chinatown. Ms. Hedayat, or Mazzy, as she asked to be called, had arrived before me. I found her seated with a teapot and matching cups, writing in a notebook. Like a therapist, I thought, except the girlish cover was decorated with gold foil stars. As we settled in, she offered me a cup of perfectly steeped oolong.

Upon starting my reading, she tore a sheet of paper from her notebook, flattening it hastily against the table before turning it toward me. It was an image of my natal chart. She tapped a symbol that looked like a lower-case h with a cross.

“You’re here because of Saturn.”

“Okay,” I said.

She continued as if what she said would have any meaning for me: “You are ruled by this planet. Your entire life and character, it’s dominated by Saturn.”

I shrugged. Observing my noncommittal response, Mazzy balled her two hands into fists and ground them against each other like millstones.

“Saturn,” she said, drawing out the “urn.” She gave me a pained expression, lips pulled into a grim grin. I felt myself mirror Mazzy’s grimace internally as once again, I recalled the months I’d sunk into organizing the Climate Action Conference. Maybe she was onto something.

I was finally on the brink of sleep at one in the morning when my phone chimed with an alert. Naomi had sent another email with quotes for a different catering package and increased security for the Climate Action Conference. This made costs significantly higher than what the planning committee had agreed to at the last meeting. My left eye started to twitch, as if on cue. In spite of myself, I opened Naomi’s attached budget even though I already knew what I’d find: that she had balanced the books by eliminating the hotly contested quiet room and cutting into travel reimbursements for BIPOC speakers in a transparent bid to undermine the student organizers. According to Naomi and other faculty volunteers, the committee was getting “bogged down with side issues,” like disability and migrant rights, that were “too complicated” and “alienating” for the general public. In Naomi’s mind, the public was solely comprised of people just like her: white middle-class liberals who needed to be encouraged by speakers focusing on net zero, vegan diets, and arguments about protecting private property.

Immediately, my brain sprang into action, gathering words into a compacted mass of arguments against her conduct to catapult into her inbox. I imagined my email being the invitation everyone needed to pelt her with their own admonitions, admonitions I knew no one would ever express because we all had learned from experience that even the most minor criticisms would result in Naomi and her allies positioning themselves anywhere on a spectrum between huffy to blubbering. And no one had the time or energy to deal with that. I lay in bed, exhausted and out of sleeping pills, my mind loosened from any self-discipline, mentally editing and re-editing an email I knew I would never send. At 3:30 a.m., I debated rolling a joint but, aware that I only had a new, higher-THC strain I’d never tried before, I had to weigh the potential gain of relaxing enough to sleep against the risk of paranoia. By the time I committed to lighting up, half an hour had passed. I wondered if I should just start getting ready now, roll into the department at 6:00 a.m., and leave early.

As Mazzy bisected the slice of Osmanthus cheesecake she’d ordered, she asked the question I’d been anticipating: “Tell me more about what brings you here?” I knew the answer, yet I wasn’t sure how to answer. People only consult astrology when they have problems. It’s cheaper and requires less commitment than therapy. I’d had enough of commitment for a while.

Months had passed since the climate conference but people were still expressing concerns for me. My best friend was making comments about self-care with increasing frequency. When I confronted her, she asked me if I realized I had become “deeply unhappy.” Of course I realized. Happy people do not think about climate disasters—not for very long anyway—nor do they persist in volunteering in racist environments. And whoever heard of a happy activist?

As the climate action conference date approached, meetings became mandatory for all volunteers. But at this point, none of the Indigenous students were attending. This was both disheartening and a relief. We’d lost a critical perspective and a chance at deepening solidarity on campus, but I knew that their attendance also meant dealing with such classic responses as, “We need to focus on the hard scientific data instead of trying to cover everything at once,” and creative improvs like, “We are dealing with Indigenous rights, why else would we invite the jingle dancers?” On rare occasions, one of the students, who might have needed to call on these same professors for reference letters or to sit on a dissertation committee, would attempt to call out a faculty member without using words like “racist,” “privilege,” or “white supremacy,” in an absurd real-life version of Taboo. Even before the land acknowledgement for the meetings concluded, I could feel my body tensing in anticipation.

As the debate unfolded, it became clear that faculty would be getting their way. They were in agreement: there was no room for the quiet room which, as we all knew, was not even a legally sanctioned accommodation. In addition, certainly we could recognize that better catering would bring more attendees back the following year. And the Dean was insisting on increased security with all the public attendees; a shame to be sure, but their hands were tied.

After the meeting, I took aside Mita, one of the student leads. I had found myself exchanging a meaningful look with them earlier in the meeting. “Don’t change your plans,” I said, “I will talk to people. We are going to bring in your speakers, okay?” Mita looked skeptical; I was only a fellow grad student after all.

“Well, I’m worried about climate change.”

Mazzy paused for me to elaborate. When I didn’t, she asked, “Okay, can you tell me more about how this is specifically impacting you right now?”

I shrugged, started, and stopped before finally picking up a thread, my voice becoming increasingly agitated: “I guess my problem isn’t actually climate change. I mean it is, obviously, but it’s more like about what’s causing it. I don’t think people really understand the problem. It’s not even about, like, colonialism and capitalism, although it’s that too, but I mean, it’s more fundamental, like an entire way of being and relating to others. Like, when people say this is an existential issue, I don’t think they really get it. There is this moral collapse that’s more than just a kind of empty narcissism, it’s a collapse in the fundamental ability to care, not only for each other, but for ourselves”—I stopped when I realized how I must have sounded. But Mazzy nodded. She was appraising me, but in a kind way.

“Do you care about yourself?”

I hesitated, but Mazzy held my gaze. I realized how tense my muscles had become as I’d been speaking. Then, spontaneously, we exhaled on the same breath. People were always asking me why I cared so much. I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them silly: why do you care so little?

I smirked and gestured to passers-by on the street.

“I care enough to not want to die with all these schmucks in the flaming climate hellscape that awaits us, yeah.”

We both laughed. It had been a while since I’d laughed like that.

By all official accounts, the Climate Action Conference was a sold-out success. With a Haudenosaunee activist as one of our keynote speakers and a schedule stacked with topics like environmental racism, climate migrants and just transition, the event began to explore the root causes of climate change for the first time. In the end, I was able to convince my department to reimburse two ASL translators through our new Equity Diversity & Inclusion program, which freed up the necessary funding for travel fees.

The conference received favourable coverage in two student newspapers and by a community radio station. A city councillor showed up for a photo-op that circulated widely on social media. My department produced a brief report of the conference that named me as an organizer and sent this out in its monthly newsletter. People congratulated me for about a week and then moved on.

Unofficially, word spread about the racism behind the scenes. Enrolment increased in Naomi’s climate science course, but many of the students on the conference planning committee refused to work with her again. The last I heard, initial planning for next year’s program was taking a hard turn away from the social justice issues raised. Unsurprisingly, conference organizers were struggling to find BIPOC students to volunteer for the following year, but it probably wouldn’t take long for faculty to pull in new people. Meanwhile, the original student organizers stayed in touch and began getting involved with direct actions in the city. As for me? Well, I disappeared right off the map.

“You’re under pressure,” Mazzy explanined. “Transiting Saturn is conjunct your natal sun, and it’s having a total impact. You might not see it now but it’s—” Mazzy raised her hands, slicing out a cube from the air and then pressing the walls in closer. “It’s like a pressure that’s pressing you into being. It’s pressing you into a diamond.”

I didn’t feel like a diamond. I felt like dust. Like Saturn was a dread, heavy palm that had smudged over a charcoal portrait of me, wiping all of my features away. Sensing my skepticism, Mazzy continued, “I know it doesn’t feel like it now. But it’s all part of the process. Saturn is pressing you into a form, it’s binding you into a shape. The ties you make now will stand the test of time whether you like it or not. So it’s really important right now to secure the right bonds because they will last and shape you for years to come.”

It was then I noticed there were tiny glittery crystals on Mazzy’s nails.

“Hey, listen.” Mazzy’s tone snapped my attention back to her face. “You need to think about what kind of shape you want to be. You need to think about the shape of things to come.”

I’m fifteen minutes late for the first climate-related meeting I’ve attended in over a year. This group includes student organizers from the Climate Action Conference, as well as people from other grassroots environmental organizations. Izan, a grad student who spoke out against racism in the conference, is chairing the meeting. The group rotates its meeting chairs every three months. Its first action was a demonstration supporting land defenders at 1492 Landback Lane.

I try my best to be unobtrusive as I find my seat while a queer youth activist I’ve never met before reads a land acknowledgement recounting the history of Treaty 13. I spot Mita sitting at the opposite side of the room. They give me a quick smile; I smile back. Izan shares the meeting agenda. He gives me a small nod of acknowledgement as he speaks.

As we begin to discuss and plan the next action, I am struck at how the room is forming into an imperfect but living circle, how we’re throwing out invisible lines to each other and catching them. I think about carbon in all its shapes, how it is taking different forms in us, in other animals, in the earth’s crust, in the air we breathe.

You need to think about what kind of shape you want to be. The shape I want to be is a weapon. I could have been so many shapes, but in times like these, I choose to be deadly. If Saturn is pressing me into a diamond, that diamond, I think, is a blade. Let everything that comes at me hone its edge.

You need to think about the shape of things to come. The shape of things to come is a fire. These flames will rise again to choke the light from our skies and the air from our lungs. My heart has burnt to cinders, but the wind, I think, can still scatter the ashes. Let it scatter them where I cannot go.

Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort when no school will hire her. An immigrant escaping the Lebanese Civil War, she has little alternative if she is to provide a semblance of security for her son, Omar, following her husband’s disappearance from the war-torn streets of Beirut.

Nasrallah, who teaches creative writing at Concordia University, elaborated on his decision to set his novel in the heyday of hotlines.

“There’s always an unsophisticated idealism baked into the possibilities of new mediums,” he says. “A little later on, everyone comes to a consensus about usage and conventions. But there’s a window of time in which people are still figuring [out] what can be done, and that was when this era of the hotline became appealing. It’s an obscure technology now, but in its heyday it spoke to that universal need to connect with others in ways we’ve emulated since with the internet and social media.”

Known for his politically charged writing in books like The Bleeds, Niko, and Blackbodying, Hotline sees Nasrallah taking inspiration from his own childhood, articulating some of his mother’s experiences working as a weight-loss call operator.

“The people who call Nutri-Fort’s hotline and speak to Muna experience the shame that comes with fatphobia,” he says. “They’d dedicated themselves to meeting the many expectations Canadian life was throwing at them, and along the way they gained weight, which set them even further back from where they wanted to be—that consensus ideal of happiness that hangs over all of us,” Nasrallah says.

“For Muna, xenophobia brings a similar shame, of not understanding the way the game is played here and the sense of being manipulated by circumstances [she doesn’t] yet understand. That shared sense of shame makes her sympathetic to the voices she counsels on the phone.”

Muna fears that her Quebecois clients struggling with loneliness and bereavement will sever their ties with her if they discover that she is a French-speaking Arab. This balancing act of appearing sympathetic to callers who would not deign to speak to her outside of a professional scenario is the lamentable if commonplace dynamic at the centre of the novel.

“The anxiety over these two forms of visibility—body image and race—were paired together for me by that situation,” Nasrallah explains. “It was only much later as an adult that I began to see how the two were linked and fit into this larger context of unattainable ideals that are a part of North America’s social fabric.” Nasrallah notes that fatphobia and xenophobia are both fears of the body. “Both come from the same intolerances and are hardwired into the social construct. Both devalue how people see themselves.”

At a time when borders are reopening and immigration numbers to Canada are beginning to rise following disincentives to travel, Hotline documents how social issues newcomers face have root causes that have not been completely addressed four decades later.

“In every historical setting in fiction, there has to be some resonance back to the current moment, something that connects the reader to the material and helps organize the story so that parallels emerge and serve to give the narrative layers of meaning,” Nasrallah says. “When we draw from the past, it’s to understand the present moment, and organize some understanding out of the parallels we see.”

ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN GARCIA

Jerry waited beneath the underpass for Tre, away from the streetlamp’s light.

Not many people were about in that part of the city, but he could always take out his phone and pretend to chat if anyone got close. It was cold, really cold, and under any other circumstance, Jerry would have gone down to Tre’s apartment in the Junction, but Tre insisted that he pick Jerry up, promised a free dinner for his time—even a ride part of the way to his house.

Jerry had agreed, but he was regretting it now. Nina was home alone, and it was getting dark.

Headlights turned the corner. Tre’s beat-up Corolla swerved slightly as it headed towards Jerry. It jerked when it stopped.
Jerry opened the passenger door and got in. “You’re late.”
“There was a bomb ting by the Tim’s, bro,” Tre said as he turned onto Eglinton.
Jerry rolled his eyes, but his lips twitched in a smile. Tre
was his most loyal customer. “Really. Did she tell you how cold it is outside?”
Tre kissed his teeth. “You would’ve forgotten. Don’ even lie.”
They passed a first, and then a second, set of stoplights. “McDonald’s is fine,” Jerry said.
“… don’t know how she be wearing yoga pants in November.”
“Right there.” Jerry pointed to the golden arch, shining over a near-empty parking lot.
“She probably has a man, still,” Tre said, pulling into the plaza. He opened the driver’s door. “You want the usual?”
“Yeah.”
Tre left and headed into McDonald’s. Jerry scanned the parking lot slowly. There was an older man coming out of a convenience store with a lottery ticket in his hand. He got to his car, lit a cigarette and drove away.
Jerry reached into his backpack and pulled out a small pouch of white powder. Digging around in the backseat of the car, he found Tre’s gym bag. He removed one of Tre’s socks and slipped the pouch inside the sock, before returning it to the bag. Jerry looked around the parking lot again—empty this time—and waited for Tre to return. It was Charles’s idea to do the exchanges that way: surreptitiously. Jerry thought it trivial, but it wasn’t as if he could complain.
A few minutes later, he heard Tre’s footsteps approach, and the car door opened, briefly letting in the cold and the sounds of late-night millings about.
Tre handed Jerry a McDonald’s bag.
Jerry buckled his seat belt. “Let me out at Jane.”
“All right. Make sure you sit at the back of the bus, eh?”
Jerry looked at his friend, was about to say he knew that already, but decided against it. Tre returned Jerry’s gaze, and Jerry could see an opening behind the man’s bloodshot eyes, through which something soft and resilient passed.
“Tell Nina I said hi.”
Jerry nodded. He got out at Jane and Eglinton and waited for the westbound bus. When it arrived, he sat at the back and ate his meal. At the bottom of the bag, was a small wad of cash covered in plastic wrap, which he didn’t take out. Not all of it belonged to him.

Their street was quiet. Most homes were sleeping, but a few saw people on their front porches, chatting discreetly, smoke from cigarettes and joints fading into the dark above. Jerry walked up the steps to his duplex, checking the frequently empty mail slot on the side of their dark red front door. He fumbled with his keys—chilled fingers—before letting himself in. Nina was lying on the couch, wearing his old painting T-shirt and basketball shorts. The television was on, but she wasn’t watching it.
“Where’s Mom?” Jerry asked.
“Working,” said Nina.
Jerry kicked off his shoes, placed the McDonald’s bag on
the side table by the door, and headed into the kitchen to wash his hands. A large, covered platter of Swiss Chalet take-out sat on the counter, untouched, not a hint of condensation on the plastic.
“What’s all this for?”
Nina sat up from the couch. “Mom’s celebrating. Results came this morning.”
Jerry knew she’d been stressing about the blood test for days, wondering how a diagnosis would affect her livelihood, even if it was curable.
“And she’s out again?” Jerry said. “Shouldn’t she be resting?”
“I know, right?”
“Where’s Will?”
“Man, I dunno!” But she was right, no one knew where their stepfather was.
As long as he paid the rent. “Did you do your homework?”
“Of course.” She sounded offended.
“Did you eat?”
“Yeah…”
“You know you lying. Come eat.”
Her face twisted into that scowl of hers, whenever she was about to fight with words. Her moaning always worked on their mom and Will, since she was little, but it didn’t work on Jerry. He pushed back. Nina finally stood and walked to the dining room. Jerry opened the container of fries and asked how
much she wanted. When she didn’t answer, he doled out the food based on how little he thought she’d eaten over the course of the day.
While Nina’s food warmed in the microwave, he brought the McDonald’s bag downstairs to his low-ceilinged bedroom in the basement. He opened the small wad of cash and peeled off two fifty-dollar bills to keep in his wallet. The rest he put in a locked metal container underneath his unkempt bed.
When Jerry returned, he set Nina’s food in front of her, took the bread rolls for himself. While he chewed, he cast eyes around the room, to see if, somehow, anything had changed in the ten hours he’d been out of the house. The potted plant in the corner needed watering. Too many shoes littered the front of the sliding doors. Will’s ashtray, normally on the dining table, was nowhere to be seen.
Jerry turned to Nina. She hadn’t moved. “What, you not hungry?”
Nina didn’t say anything. She picked up her fork and set it down again.
“Mom’ll be fine. She makes good money.”
“That’s not what I’m concerned about.”
“What is it, then?”
She looked away and pursed her lips. Jerry knew she always did that when she was planning her response.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll take your fries,” Jerry said.
He brought his hand close to her plate, and she slapped it away.
“I got a scholarship,” she finally told him.
Jerry’s eyes grew wide. “What?” he yelled. “Oh, my God, that’s amazing!”
Nina’s lips twitched. “I know that.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you know that! Gimme some.” He held his palm out and she slapped it halfheartedly. “That’s my girl!”
Nina picked up a fry and bit into it.
“We need to celebrate. We need something fancy. Like an
ice cream cake.”
“Mom’s lactose intolerant.”
“Good. It’s not for her anyway.”
They laughed.
“How much?” he asked.
“Ten thousand.”
Jerry mimed falling off his chair. He pressed his hand against his chest, took exaggerated breaths.
They laughed some more.
Nina’s smile disappeared first. She took another fry.
Jerry picked at the bread. “Do you not see that this is good news?”
“I guess.”
“What?”
Nina looked at her plate. “I don’t want to use it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want to use it? You’re just going to hold on to it?”
Nina looked up at him. “Charles called.”
Jerry froze.
“I want to pay him back.”
Jerry frowned. “No.”
“But it’s my fault!”
“Nina, I swear to Christ, we are not having this conversation again.” He cursed Charles for calling the house. He knew Jerry’s cellphone number. “Just eat your damn fries and pay the school.” Why was she like this?
“You won’t have to work for him anymore!”
“Don’t worry about who I work for. I worked for all kinds
of folks, people you don’t even know about.”
“What if I got a job?”
“You have a job,” Jerry said. “Being a student.”
Nina pushed her plate aside. It scraped loudly across the wooden table. She didn’t meet his gaze.
Jerry stared. “You already got a job, didn’t you?”
“I figured you would be mad.”
He raised his hands and stared skyward for a moment, before leaning forward. “Do you not hear me when I talk, girl? Am I talking to a wall?”
Nina’s voice grew high. “It’s small. Tutoring. Six hours a week.”
“Six hours where you could be studying.”
She leaned back, face disgusted. “Excuse me, I just got a huge-ass scholarship. I think my studying habits are fine.”
Jerry wiped his face with his hand. “Look…” He didn’t know what to add. “Just. Don’t.”
“It’s my life.”
“Exactly. Don’t screw it up with your running around trying to be like all your friends.”
She glared at him. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Fine. Let me handle the money,” Jerry said. “I’m almost a quarter of the way there anyway.” He looked at her. “Just … just let me take care of you, okay? Let me take care of you.”
She stared at him, her eyes darting around his face, as if searching for something. The clock ticked loudly in the living room.
After a while, she said, “A quarter, huh? That’s a lot.”
He scoffed. “Yeah.” He smiled at her. “But don’t worry about it. I’ll get you whatever you need. Just ask.”
She pursed her lips again. This time, she looked out the sliding doors to the yard. But it was dark outside, and Jerry could see his sister’s reflection perfectly in the glass.
“You can ask, you know,” he ventured. “And you don’t have to hide shit. Especially shit like a whole-ass scholarship.”
“I don’t know.”
Jerry shook his head, reining in his frustration at the last second. “You’re in my business too much.”
“You’re in my business, too!”
He smiled, and she smiled back, just a little.
She rubbed her temples, running her fingers against the wispy hairs along the perimeter of her forehead. “I just … I feel bad.”
“Don’t. Feel determined. Feel special.”
“It’s hard. Knowing what happened.”
Jerry shrugged. “I saw an opportunity. And if I’m working for Charles for the rest of my life, it doesn’t matter. Not as long as you’re something.”
Nina shifted in her chair.
“Hey,” he said. He reached for her hand and held it. She squeezed it. “You can’t stay here, you know. I’ll be damned if you’re my age and still living here. You gotta have that … that inter … something. That thing where you save money for your kids.”
“Intergenerational growth?”
He pointed. “Yeah, yeah, that.”
Nina opened her mouth to respond, but he held a finger up. “You don’t owe me anything.”
She nodded, swallowed hard. After a few seconds, she said, almost hopefully, “But you’ll come to me if you need anything, though, right?”
Jerry smirked. “Um. No. If anyone gives you shit, I’mma have Charles call them. You know.”
“Like he would!”
He threw a bun at her. “Well, if not him, me.”
They looked at each other some moments. Long enough for understanding to pass through them like smoke, but not too long.
“You don’t need to,” Nina said. “What with my recent endowment.” She picked up a napkin and fanned herself like a Southern belle. “I’ll get you an Xbox for all your hard work.”
He kissed his teeth. “Xbox? Get outta here. PS4.”
They laughed.

Charles texted Jerry later that evening. Jerry held his phone tightly in his hand as it buzzed. Once, twice, three times, before it settled. He lay on his back, across the surface of his bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling.
In his mind, he pictured Nina, half a lifetime ago, her hands wrapped around a medal she won for a chess tournament, the only girl among a sea of her lighter-skinned peers. The closer he approached adulthood, the more iridescent she became, and he felt light and heavy at once.
He headed upstairs, the metal lockbox of cash at the bottom of his backpack. Charles was always out somewhere at an ungodly hour, waiting. As Jerry passed the living room, he saw Nina sprawled on the couch, asleep, two textbooks open on the coffee table in front of her. The bright dead colours of the aquarium channel splashed onto her face, her slightly parted lips.
He touched his sister’s cheek. Her face was warm, her breath warm. And her body rose purposefully and safely as she breathed in sleep, in future. He stared at her some time.
His phone buzzed again.
Before he left, he spotted his jacket folded over the top of a closet door, and put it on over his hoodie as he jogged down the front steps. There. Better. A buffer against the wind, which had picked up, it seemed, in the absence of bodies. It was as if the world around him misunderstood its relationship with its inhabitants, and Jerry felt something he couldn’t quite articulate. At the end of the street, near the intersection,
he could see the familiar blue-and-yellow lights of the bus, and headed toward them.

ILLUSTRATION BY MATHIAS BALL

There are bed bugs in my apartment building, so we have to flee, fucking posthaste. I pack my roommate’s cat up in her little crate and hop into my inheritance from old Auntie Doreen, a blue ‘98 Chevy Lumina. We barely make it out before they have the white and blue bubble wrap covering the building and the chemicals pumping in. The landlords told us about five minutes before all these exterminators arrived looking like astronauts and stomping around in the building. Push everything out from the walls, they kept yelling, like we had all the time in the world.

I think the plumber yelled the same thing last time the building flooded out. We’re ground floor, too, so all the shit from the three stories above us floods in. I told the landlords to call a fucking plumber a few days beforehand when the sink was gurgling and spitting, but, nope, they couldn’t understand what I was saying. Wasn’t speaking in dollars. But shit, what can you do, it’s all slumlords everywhere. An English prof told me once that Thomas King wrote about stories and it’s all turtles, all the way down. Well this is slumlords. It’s fucking slumlords all the way down.

I drive my car from the Avenue of Champs down to the university area. Thank god I put some change in the gas tank on Monday, discount day at the Domo. It’s cold, like my balls have gone back inside my stomach cold. The cat’s purring away in her little crate.

Prairie and I make it to campus and people are looking at me like, what the fuck, why is this guy walking through the Humanities building carrying a cat? And I see them snickering. All the other students without cats in crates. And it occurs to me for the first time that this may have been a bad idea but I didn’t think about it, I never think about it, unfortunately, until it’s too late. But fuck it, I smile back. I got nowhere else to go and I don’t want this cat to get fumigated or freeze to death in my car, so we’re both gonna hit up my Indigenous Literatures class. The cat might get more out of it than I will. Because right now I don’t know where those turtles are.

“Why do you have a cat with you?” Professor Gladue asks me.

“Why wouldn’t I have a cat with me?” is what I wish I had the confidence to say. Instead I mumble something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, I can leave if you want.”

“No, it’s fine, just sit in the back, ugh,” she replies. I head to the back as she instructs, and take a seat. Professor Gladue is very intimidating. Knows a lot about everything related to Natives and, I assume, everything else. She’s from out east, some ‘Nish rez, I think. Though there are Gladues all over this area. Part of me wishes—okay, all of me wishes—that I had my shit together and could impress her with a story or a poem or something. Instead I got a cat and half a pack of Canada Goose smokes.

No one sits by me. But no one ever does. I’m straight up that kid. I used to be popular back in our ghetto-ass high school and during summers back at Buffalo Pound. That kind of popularity doesn’t translate to the university, though. Here, it’s all about the money and not being the smelly guy, reeking like old cigarettes, plastic bottle whiskey and Old Milwaukee’s, and carrying a cat. Who’s thinking, that dude’s the shit, when I’m carrying a fucking cat around. Prairie’s cool with no one hanging by us, though. She just chills, purrs a bit, then goes to sleep. Makes me wish someone was carrying me around. I’d reverse our roles in a heartbeat. Then I think, shit, I just wish I had somewhere or someone to go to right now. But I don’t.

Class goes by slow. I can barely concentrate on the best of days. Today is not one of them and I spend most of the class sticking my fingers through the crate door trying to pet Prairie. She’s having a great time, all snuggled up and purring away in her sleep, just out of reach of my flailing fingers. I want to open the cage up and pull her into my lap, but I think that might be the last straw with the prof and that would be it for my university experience. The other students in the class ignore me and I watch as they put up their hands and answer question after question.

Professor Gladue watches the students as they drone on. I watch her watch the students. She ignores me. The cat continues to do a combined snore-purr, ignoring everyone.

Class ends and I have nothing else for the day. I step outside the Humanities building for my after class smoke, just to feel that the sun hasn’t warmed anything up and it’s still biting cold. I had been entertaining the idea of sleeping in my car but, in this temperature, we’d be dead before morning. The cat wakes up and I let her out of her crate to run around on the frozen ground. The cement freezes her paws and she darts back into the crate. I realize that I forgot to grab cat food in the mad dash. My bank account is reading really low, so I’m hoping that the cat will eat some leftovers I can scrounge up from the garbage cans around the university. I guess if worse comes to worst I can try and steal some food for the cat from the grocery store down the block. I’ll be fine. It isn’t my first time going without for a few days and I’m not above my classmates’ leftovers. Never have been, not going to start now. Last time the building was getting fumigated, they made us stay out for three days. I’m assuming that’s our timeline this round, too. No one mentioned otherwise, not that they would—those shady fucks, they don’t give a shit. They would probably prefer if none of us ever came back to the building so they could just live in this weird little fumigated slumlord kingdom with no slummies to worry about.

Prairie and I find some food, then we set up shop down in the library computer area. I don’t have my own computer, so I use this forced time at the university to actually do some homework for once. It’s getting late and the library is getting down to the weirdos. There’s some old guy watching dude-on-dude porn in the corner. His computer screen is just one big cock with another guy’s hand stroking it. A crew of Korean kids are playing video games a couple computers away from him. I’m sitting here with a cat. We’re a motley crew. Each time the cat shifts in her crate, I start thinking she’s going to start losing it, since she’s been in this box for most of the day. And I want to lose it and I haven’t even been in a box, at least not one this confining. There’s an offset room, one of those study ones that students can use. I roll in there with Prairie and let her out again. First thing, I turn off the lights. Hopefully security will be lazy tonight and not do proper rounds. It’s so fucking cold outside. I really don’t want to sleep in the car. If you sleep in the car, you wake up just fucking frozen. I don’t have enough gas to run the car all night to keep the heat going either.

Prairie scurries around a bit checking out the new digs. It’s a small room. Just a round table and six chairs. I push one of the chairs up against the door handle. A little security in case someone does try and get in here. Maybe they’ll get the hint if the door doesn’t open. I stretch out under the table and start cruising through my textbook from Professor Gladue’s class looking for examples of conflict between Tricksters and the characters.

The door slams open and the chair goes flying against the side of the wall with a crash. There’s a flashlight on my face and the lights scream on.

“Is that a fucking cat?” I hear a voice yell. Some dude jumps on me and presses his knee into my throat.

“What are you doing in here?” the knee asks.

“I’m a student, shit, I just fell asleep.”

“Do you have identification?” Knee presses harder into me.

“Relax. Fuck. It’s in my pocket. Can you get the fuck off of me?” The knee presses up but he keeps a lock on me. There’s a second security guard in the doorway blocking any chance for a run. They both look like cop school dropouts but are still trying to play the game, moustaches and the whole nine yards. I see Prairie in the corner checking it all out. She’s got her hackles up. What if she jumps up and scratches the shit out of this security bro. What would he do? It would be funny as hell, but he’d probably smash her. I didn’t want that at all. I reach in my back pocket and pull out my student I.D. card.

“See, I’m a fucking student.”

“Well, you can’t be sleeping here.”

“Where the hell else am I going to go? It’s fucking cold out there, man.”

“A lot of people sleep in that Tim Hortons/Wendy’s by the hospital.”

The security guard releases his grip on me. I walk over and grab Prairie and put her in the kennel.

“Either way. You can’t be in here anymore. You need to
leave campus.”

“What if I start studying or something?”

“No, you need to leave now.”

I grab my backpack and the kennel and start walking out of the library. There are still a few students at the 24-hour computers. They’ve all turned to look at me. The old dude and his porn are long gone. I should have just fucking sat at one of those computers, I think to myself. A couple students are sleeping on couches toward the entrance.

“What about those guys?” I ask security.

“They’re studying.”

Security walks me off campus.

Inside the Tim Hortons/Wendy’s, a cat is the last of anyone’s worries. It’s packed in there. One side of the eating area has been completely taken over by homeless people. They’re spread out on the benches and on the floor, under tables and in the lanes. Prairie and I find a spot under one of the only free tables and settle in. I use my backpack as a pillow. It’s uncomfortable as fuck and the floor is sticky, covered in something that’s definitely not double double. But, shit, it could be, too. At this point, I’m tired and my mind is clogged from eating only scraps and smoking cigarettes all day. I put Prairie right next to me. I’m not worried about anyone taking her since everyone here has their own problems to deal with. At this moment, we all just want to get through the night and this cat is the only thing bringing me any sort of comfort.

I never truly sleep in a situation like this. I’ll get a bit of rest and then I’m awake again, constant vigilance, you know. Never comfortable, cold and sticky, fluorescent lights burning down, and a stream of people from the university hospital and kids from the residence buildings coming in for coffees and Timbits. They all avoid looking at our little camp. Which is probably for the best, as I don’t want to see anyone I might be in a class with. It’s already embarrassing enough having a cat in class. Now I have a cat and I’m sleeping on the floor of the Tim Hortons/Wendy’s. Classic fuck-up right here.

One of the boys sleeping on the bench above me rolls over and belches. His breath is full of old nicotine and cold French fries and goes right into my nose.

“Rest up kid, they’re gonna come in and boot us out of here at six,” he says to me.

I roll over and face the other way, but it’s more uncomfortable on my side so I’m back on my back in a second, staring at the underside of the table. We’ve got a few hours at least, I think to myself. French fry breath starts snoring above me.

“Daniel, is that you?”

I close my eyes tighter. It’s just a dream. It’s just Prairie talking to me.

“Daniel. What are you doing?”

I know the voice: it’s Professor Gladue from Indigenous Lit. I open my eyes. She’s standing there a good ten feet away from the homeless area. With her are two guys and a lady. They all look fancy and clean, even though they’re just wearing winter coats and wool toques. But they’re those coats that are brown wool and have nice collars. None of them are doubling up on hoodies and wearing beer box freebie toques. They all just look clean, clean beards, clean hair, clean. I don’t think they have bed bugs or lice or fleas or meth-heads running around in their buildings.

“Hey,” I say.

“Are you okay? Do you need anything?” she asks. Her voice sounds different than it does in class. Less authoritative, friendlier, not hollow.

“Nah, I’m good.” Her crew are all staring at me. Their eyes are pitiful. “I’ll see you in class, thanks.”

“Is the cat with you?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah, right here.” I pat the hoodie draped over Prairie’s crate.

“Okay,” she says. Her crew starts walking toward the door. She follows them and at the last minute turns around and looks back at me. I’m trying to pretend I’m already asleep but I notice. And I’m thinking how fucked I am for next class now. She’s going to think I’m a real piece of shit. She’s not going to take a word that I write for the essay seriously. This is done. It’s too late in the semester to drop though, so I’ll have to take the F. With the academic probation shit, that’ll boot me out of school. But hell, it was never meant to be anyway. I close my eyes. Six a.m. comes too early in the winter. I can hear Prairie softly purring from inside her crate. She seems comfy, carefree, cozy. I would give anything to be able to crawl inside that crate with her and cuddle up.

Illustration By Christine Wei

I always knew Elliott would leave. I was never under the impression I got to keep him forever. And besides—I’m not that kind of selfish. Sometimes, it almost felt like I should have chased him away early. Kept him from wasting his time on me.

“But what do you get out of this,” I’d ask sometimes, smiling so he wouldn’t think it mattered.

“That’s not what this is about,” he’d say.

And I would almost, somehow, fall in love with him.

But not quite, because that’s not what it was about either.

By the time I hit Ossington, the storm is a blizzard. Cars crawl beside me. I wrinkle my nose at their tires and picture how things will work when cars will fly. Surely, with so much space in the sky, people will get where they need to go.

I haven’t walked this part of the city in a long time. I don’t know the shops—too cool and too expensive for me—and the restaurants have shifted, some closed, some new, some that seem a block or two off where they should be. Most of it is probably me. Everything is changing, year after year, and the city disorients me these days.

We can’t choose when people leave us, but I thought Elliott would leave when I met Mack.

Mack was some kind of fairy creature. She worked a bar in the Junction at night, and volunteered by day. Her leftover time was poured into painting. Canvases on canvases choked our hallway and spilled through our rooms and never, never got put away.

Sometimes I’d come home in the evening, and Elliott would be sitting quietly, watching Mack work; her hair tied up, a glorious halo of matted chestnut. I would join them, watching the way her shoulders worked as she moved colours across canvas. Always making something. What there was was never enough for Mack.

When she left, she left the paintings, too.

The wind bites my cheeks when I hit Bloor. I feel smaller in the snow, like a Christmas village figurine. I peer east, wonder what this stretch of street will look like in ten years. Mack once called Toronto a city of ghosts, full with memories of beautiful buildings that were deemed worthless.

Elliott wasn’t interested in things like buildings and developments. Too real for him, bogged down in circular conversations. When we walked, it was rarely together. He would run ahead, lag behind, or dip into some strange shortcut he thought he knew. But I never held his absence against him. Not like I did with Mack when she turned her voice off or rushed ahead so she wouldn’t have to fight with me anymore. Walking with Elliott was like walking with myself. As we drifted through neighbourhoods, sometimes I thought of him and sometimes I didn’t.

Today, loneliness pinches my shoulders. It winds down my back and through my spine, jumbling my stomach into nausea.

I met Elliott at a birthday party. One of those horrible ones where the whole class was invited and no one wanted you there. I retreated to the corner of the basement, gaping at the birthday girl’s endless Barbie collection, strewn over her Barbie mansion—wondering how none of them had purple hair or buzzcuts, what kind of bizarre self-control she had.

When I turned around, Elliott was there, beaming widely.

“Do you like them?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“But you like them better than the other kids.”

I nodded.

He laughed, and our bonds of friendship were forged in the fires of exclusion.

When I sidle into my apartment, a stack of Mack’s paintings crash down in a crowd of canvas and dust from where they were gingerly leaning against the wall in my too-small hallway.

“Shit.”

I take care not to step them and close the door behind me. Hang up my keys. Take off my boots.

Taking off my coat, I knock into the biggest canvas, hanging awkwardly on the wall. Too big for the space. It’s an abstract one, blues and reds and angry lines, and I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean. With my tired, numb fingers, I try to straighten it. The floor and ceiling tilt in different directions. There is no even.

My parents decided Elliott was imaginary early on. After that, they rarely used Elliot’s name, preferring the parentally approved “your imaginary friend,” or when they were feeling peppy, “imagination boy,” like he was a superhero. When they did use his name, it was with a not-so-sly raised eyebrow at the other parent over the dinner table.

“How was Elliott today?” They’d ask, the sound of it wide and foolish.

Later, when I was “old enough,” it became: “Remember Elliott, your make believe friend? That was so fun, wasn’t it? You had such a great imagination.”

Their laughter would roll, because anything that wasn’t their sort of real was a joke.

“I remember,” I would say, grinning. They would think it was for them, a part of their mirth. But it was for Elliott, sitting there all along.

After my parents, I didn’t tell anyone about Elliott until Elena. We were home alone, after two weeks of every so often deciding we should kiss—busily, we flipped through magazines and acted like we’d never been more than friends.

Elena knew things about feminism and politics, and I was so sure I loved her. So I told her. And she stopped kissing me.

She stopped everything with me.

I bought Mack a ring on our two-year anniversary. Just a slim band of gold. When I gave it to her, she cried, and wouldn’t let me promise that I’d eventually get her a better one. She put it on and didn’t take it off until the day she left, and I found it on our kitchen table with a note that said Thank you.

No “we drifted apart” or “it’s just not working.” No follow up email or calls, just a text that asked me to not get in touch. To let us mourn apart.

My first real relationship and my first real breakup. Neither went the way people say they should. You don’t want to marry your first. You don’t leave without a word. I felt, at the time, that I deserved more: a screaming match, a thrown plate.

But I hadn’t listened when we were together. So I listened when she was gone. I gave her silence, hoarded her paintings, and retreated to baths where I ducked underwater and surrendered myself to a world where every sound was distorted.

Elliott came often then, and I treated him poorly. Some days I curled around his arm and wept into his shoulder. Others, I ignored him, playing video games, pretending I was alone—and then covertly glancing over my shoulder to make sure he was still there. Of course he was.

Until then, I’d spent all my time dreaming up beautiful futures, where Mack and I bought a house deep in Ontario farm country. We were supposed to have two dogs. Fancy appliances. Visits from parents who told us how proud they were, how good we were. We spent long nights skin to skin, where I murmured those stories to her.

But futures weren’t enough, while I held the present hostage.

Mack knew. She couldn’t see or hear Elliott. I’d never spoken a word about him. But she felt him in our home and conversations and dreams. She used words to describe me like “distant” and “silent” and I disdained her for it. She couldn’t control me, or the relationship she never knew I had. No one deserved that much power.

It wasn’t until after Elliott was gone, and I let myself be lonely instead of angry or scared, that I realized it was never about control. At least, not for her.

Home is musty and frigid. I fumble with my
extra heater. It’s huge, half the length of my galley kitchen. I kneel on the crumbling tiles of the floor, turning the knobs futilely. It took five years to accept that “utilities included” meant “you will freeze” and Elliott finally convinced me to buy the damned thing.

I figure out which knob is the fan and which is the temperature, and that just because the light is on doesn’t mean it’s running. The heater sputters to life, feeding putrid plastic warmth into the air. I sit at the table, my coat still wrapped around me, and let the heat seep into my socks.

Elliott came and went through doors, but not like the rest of us. You’d get the sense of a passage opening and then a sudden thereness. He lived somewhere between two states: unthere and there.

Elliott was in every moment of my life. When he wasn’t there, I was waiting for him to be there. And waiting was horrible. Suddenly, I was a child again, peering down the street to watch for their friend’s family’s car.

Without him, my life paused, and I spent my time hiding in corners with books and Gameboys. With him, I flew through neighbourhoods, collecting memories of whole worlds excavated in backyards and schoolyards. Unpredictable was the word thrown around by my guidance counsellors and teachers, and adopted by my parents.

I never knew where he went when he was unthere. I spent long hours asking him if there were other children he took care of, and if I could have him to myself. But even when questioned, he only smiled that Elliott smile. Changed the topic with such ease that I wouldn’t notice until hours or months or even years later. When I showed concern, he guided me away from my worries, and into a sense of comfort that lasted as long as he was there.

For a while, around thirteen, I tried tailing him when he left. I was certain that if I could follow him to unthere, I’d prove that I was important enough to stay for. But the way he moved through space wasn’t available to me, and halfway down a street he would be gone and I would be standing alone, absent-minded and disoriented.

A tempestuous murrrr sounds from the
floor, and the blunt force of a cat’s head hits my shin.

“Okay, okay,” I say, like the cat is a person. I dig through the cupboards where I never put anything away right until I find the scoop and food.

Mack left the cat like she left the paintings. We adopted him together, one year in. She thought I needed the company, working from home. He’s eight, and feisty, and loves me probably more than anything ever has before. At first, I thought her leaving the cat was irresponsible. It was her choice to get it in the first place, I told Elliott often. What could she have been thinking? What if I gave the cat up? What if I forgot about it, and it died? How would she feel then?

But at night, it curls up on my chest, and purrs into the quiet dark. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I nestle my fingers in its fur until I do.

I don’t resent Elliott. My whole body aches over it, of course. For the magic I miss, without him there to wield it.

It was soon after Mack left, but not too soon. After I had used up all my tears, but before I could stem the upset.

“Why are you even here,” I asked one day, rephrasing my favourite question. But it was sharp, and real, and full of mourning for something he couldn’t fix.

It sliced through some invisible line between us.

Suddenly, I couldn’t feel the flutter of his heart when he was in the same room. His voice echoed, filled with static. I hadn’t known that I carried both of us inside my chest. Pushing him out had taken so little effort, but without him my ribs felt empty.

“I’m not sure,” he said, smiling, but a smile that we both knew couldn’t fix what I’d done. Not like the usual smile. “I’m never sure why, or how, I’m ever here. I’m just here when I can help, Ver.”

He gave my arm a squeeze.

That night, he left through his mysterious door. I lay in bed watching the shadows eat the light on my ceiling, and his absence filled my room.

I haven’t tried to find him since. I know better now.

His door is one of many that will not open for me.

I brew some tea to the sound of the wind hitting my weak little windows. Cup my mug in my palms, pull it close for the heat, and go perch on the couch.

Through the evening, I’ve stacked Mack’s paintings across the floor of the living room. There’s something adult about the loneliness that sweeps across them, etching itself in my hands as I picked each one up. Like the first time you clean your own skinned knee.

The paintings become two stacks: mail and throw out. Some of them, Mack left too quickly to take, but I know she loved them. Those go to her—no note, no call, nothing of me. Just what’s hers.

I wrap the others that need to be mailed. Ones meant for nieces, parents, friends. I have their addresses. The wedding list will come in handy now. It’ll cost a fortune, but the space is worth it. They’ll go tomorrow.

The others, she hated. Some have wild slashes of dark paint across them, made into something they were never meant to be, cursed by disappointment. These, I take downstairs in armfuls. One gives me a splinter that I have to tug out with my teeth. I suck on the wound, where it wells with blood, and I notice one of the smaller paintings—splotched with a mark of failure, but edged in with beauty. I run my good fingers over it, feel the texture, the way the colours meld. It almost means something. So when I’m done, I take it upstairs with me. The snowflakes that landed on it melt, and it glistens in the yellow light of the apartment’s stairwell. I’ll put it up, amongst the rows of empty nails, one small thing. And it will be beautiful.

In bed, I imagine building an ice castle. Just
me in a wide open valley, carving bricks and placing them one on top of the other, until there are gleaming walls and turrets and ceilings and doors. When it is done, I shiver. Nearly frozen, cheeks pink, fingers numb. Nonetheless in awe of what I’ve made.

And, though my trembling hands can barely shape the ice, I start to form a handle.

KERRY C. BYRNE is an autistic, queer and nonbinary writer/cat lover living in Toronto. Their other work is forthcoming and/or published in Kaleidotrope, Monstering, The Temz Review, and others. The rest of the time, they can be found working on Augur Magazine as publisher—or maybe reliving their glory days as an award-winning collegiate a cappella singer in their bathroom. Find them on Twitter as @kercoby.

Illustration by Myriam Wares

I went over to the house the day after Ma told us her news. Vietnamese folk opera was playing in the background, familiar tales of love, betrayal, and misunderstandings.

These lyrical tones and string instruments made up the soundtrack of my childhood. I pulled off my waterproof boots and hung up my puffy faux fur-lined parka. Although we had already passed the vernal equinox weeks ago, winter still held Winnipeg in its icy embrace. I slid my feet into my plastic slippers, while shaking my head. Even though I had moved out, I hadn’t been permitted to take my slippers with me. More out of habit than from a sense of belief, in the living room I stood briefly in front of the altar of my maternal grandparents, stared at their black and white photos, and bowed my head in greeting. The lingering trace of incense singed the back of my throat.

“Ma oi?” I called out.

My mom was in the kitchen, of course. “Kim, why are you here?”

She sat on a low stool in the middle of the ceramic tile floor, newspaper down around her, slightly turned away from me. Even after all these years in Canada and now being in her dream kitchen with a built-in pantry, granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances, Ma still cooked as she did as a girl in her homeland. On one side a stack of long green banana leaves the length of my arm lay beside her and large bowls of ingredients were on the other. She was wrestling a banana leaf-wrapped bundle between her hands, binding pink plastic string around it. The string was looped around her big toe, a kind of third hand to keep the string taunt and manageable, while she crafted her masterpiece. Tiny plastic threads floated about her like fairy dust.

I stood a few feet away. “I don’t know.”

“Nice surprise. To see you two days in a row without telling you to come over, that never happens.” She didn’t look up.
Her tone was light but there was an edge to it.

I rolled my eyes. Less than a minute and here we go. “Where is everyone?”

“Ba and Vinh are at Chu Tu’s to help with the floors. Hai said something before leaving but I don’t know.”

Of course, my dad and brothers would want to escape, after yesterday. So we were alone.

“Why are you making banh tet now, Ma?” It was a cake made with sticky rice stuffed with yellow bean paste and pieces of pork meat, all wrapped together in banana leaves and boiled.

“I want to. It’s one of my favourite dishes for Tet.”

Because I won’t be around for another Tet. That unsaid statement hung in the air between us.

I closed the distance and sat down cross-legged on the floor beside her. “I remember Lunar New Year a few years ago when we had it here. People brought over wine and champagne and left it out in the snow. It all froze before we could drink it.”

“Yes, Chu Tu was not happy. It was good wine, he said over and over again.” She laughed a little as she spread more sticky rice on banana leaves.

“Or the Tet at Co Sau’s house when baby Michelle was only a few months old and threw up all over Anh’s new red shirt.
She was so chubby back then.”

“Now she’s started swimming lessons your cousin told me last week.” She layered mung bean paste on the sticky rice and added cubes of pork. “Or this year and Co Sau made the che I make and brought it to my house. It was too sweet, ruined.”

I fought the urge to stand up and leave. “Yes, this year.”

We both knew the air had shifted.

Ma paused. “You didn’t eat my banh this past year.”

“Nope.” I looked down at the floor.

A couple months ago, Ma and I were barely speaking but she had still commanded me to be at the family Lunar New Year party. She had forbidden me to bring Jon, even though we had been living together for almost a year.
And I had obeyed. After everything, I still could not fully pull away. Ba hadn’t acknowledged me when I came into the house. Hai punched me on the arm but all Vinh could do was lecture me when we were making up the li xi packages for the younger cousins.

I set out a platter of candied fruits—ginger, coconut—and lotus seeds and roasted watermelon seeds on the living room coffee table. People swarmed around instantly. I started to head back to the kitchen for my next assignment, my head bowed and my gaze fixed on the floor in front of me, playing the demure and dutiful child.

“Kim, come here and talk to me,” Co Vy said in Vietnamese and waved me towards an empty spot beside her. Ma was on
the other side of Co Vy and gave me a look, her lips thin.

Be careful, I winced inside, but respectfully slid over to them.

“Happy New Year,” Co Vy continued in Vietnamese, looking at me with interest. A hair grew out of a dark mole near the bottom of her jaw but it was only visible when she lifted up her chin. That often happened as she liked to tilt her head back to inspect people through the bifocals on the end of her nose.
Her thinning black hair curled at her temples, framing wrinkles that webbed her eyes.

“Tell your daughter she needs to eat more. She’s too skinny.” Co Vy put her hand on Ma’s hand.

Ma replied in Vietnamese, “Oh she’s so grown up now. She makes her own decisions. You’ll see with your own daughter in a few years.” Ma removed her hand from under Co Vy’s.

Why did I need to sit here if they were going to talk about me like I wasn’t even here?

“Your mom says you work so hard. That’s why you’re never here when I drop by.”

“Yes, work.”

I sat quietly for seven more minutes of emotional landmines, half-truths, and avoidance until my mom and her friend turned their attention to another young person, waving them over to take my seat. I faked a stomach ache, and locked myself in my old bedroom, jam-packed with the stuff I had been forbidden to move out. When everyone left, I crept out of the house, my breath frosty and the world a black blanket shimmering with stars, not saying goodbye to anyone in my family.

“You look tired,” Ma said to me, after finishing tying another bundle.

Last night, I had gone back to the apartment I shared with Jon and cried on the bathroom floor, locking the door behind me. Jon stood on the other side, begging me to come out, begging me to let him help me. I turned on the tap to muffle
the sound of my sobs.

“So do you,” I countered.

She almost smiled.

I watched her make more banh and tried to write the memory in my head. The curve in her back as she bent over the leaves. The tension in the plastic string. The bend in her knee as she brought her leg closer to her chest. Her hands, confident and adept with her tools, moved to a medium-paced rhythm. She was relaxed, doing what she loved.

I picked up a leaf and began tearing at it. “Are you scared Ma? Of what’s to come?” It surprised me that question came out of my mouth.

“Of dying? I’m not afraid.”

“Why not?”

“I think of Quan Am and she gives me strength. She turned back from the brink of nirvana to stay on earth to help those that suffer as a bodhisattva. During times of my life when I didn’t think I would be able to bear it, she wrapped me in her arms and told me I wouldn’t be alone.”

I always envied Ma’s faith.

“You talk like you’ve already given up. Is that why you refuse treatment?” I kept tearing the banana leaf.

“No, I’m not ready. I’m not ready to become an ancestor, to cross over, to only be with you in spirit.” She looked past my shoulder, into empty space. “But I have lived long enough to know life doesn’t go the way we plan sometimes. I can only accept what is to come. Remember the story of the mosquito?”

I nodded.

“Tell it back to me then,” she challenged.

I sighed. “There was a beautiful woman in rural Vietnam long ago who died unexpectedly. Her husband brought her back to life by giving her three drops of his blood after a fairy took pity on him. The woman was not content with her humble life and was going to leave her husband for a richer man. The husband told her she could leave but to give him back his three drops of blood. She pricked her finger and squeezed out three drops and then she was transformed into a mosquito. From that day on, she has fed on the blood of humans, trying to get the three drops back to live again.”

Ma nodded, satisfied. “I used to think this story was about the wickedness of women, temptation, like Eve and the apple, Pandora and her box. But it’s about acceptance, the husband accepting his wife’s death, the wife accepting their modest lifestyle.”

“So she was cursed to want something always out of reach.”

“When the moment comes, I will be ready,” Ma said and looked up at me.

My face was hot. I felt the tears welling up and trickling down my cheeks without my consent. My life without Ma. To not see the disapproving look on her face or hear the disappointed tone in her voice and to not know her opinions so I could orient my perspective around hers. The more I wanted to break away, the more I still came back to her. She was my anchor, which was both a comfort and a weight. I started to panic as the realization hit me, delayed after yesterday’s news.

Ma reached out and held my chin between her sticky fingers and looked directly at me. “No tears Kim. Not for me. Not for you. Even if it’s only for today.”

Ma was telling me what to do. Instinctively, I wanted to do the opposite. What would I do once she was gone? Another wave of panic washed over me. She still stared at me, expecting my obedience. It took all my strength to gather my feelings up, fold them and tuck them out of the way. When Ma was satisfied with what she saw in my eyes, she let go of my chin.

“So, what do you want me to do?” I said, trying to move on to another subject.

“Just help me clean up. I’m finishing the last one.”

For the next few hours as we waited for the banh tet to cook, we talked together like we were not Kim and Ma, but like another daughter and her mother, gossiping about family matters, world events, and the future. Would Vinh find a wife? Would Hai ever grow up? Would I find a job I was happy to do? I put aside the memories that separated us, that drove me away from her over the past few years—when I was in university and even before then. We spoke of memories that held us together.

I noticed the skin around Ma’s eyes crinkled when she laughed. I noticed she liked her tea strong and dark, leaving no loose tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. I wrote these memories in my head too. She was tired and had to sit down. Sometimes it was easy to forget she was sick, but sometimes it hung heavy on her.

“What is one of your favourite stories Ma? One that you haven’t told me before.” I had never invited a story from Ma before. She just told them and I had to listen.

“I don’t think I’ve told you about Muc Kien Lien.”

“No,” I said, sipping my tea.

Ma sat up on the couch. “A long time ago, Muc Kien Lien was a boy who lived in Vietnam. He reached enlightenment at a young age and became a disciple of Buddha. But his mother was a wicked woman. When she died, because of the evil life she led, she was sentenced to the worst level of hell and tortured by demons. Muc Kien Lien was a dutiful and loving child so he had to do whatever he could to help her. He asked Buddha what he could do in order for his mother to be released from hell. Buddha told him to hold the ceremony of Vu Lan to pray for his mother’s soul. He did and her sins were pardoned. That was how Mua Vu Lan was started, the Day of Wandering Souls, the day we leave food out for the ancestors. It’s the day wandering souls can safely return home. Souls can be absolved of sin and delivered from hell through the prayers of their living relatives just like Muc Kien Lien’s mother.” Ma took a sip of tea, signalling the end to the story.

I didn’t know what to say.

She added, “It reminds me that children can feel love for their parents, show their parents honour, and help their parents find their way back to the right path. Muc Kien Lien loved his mother even though she was not always good and helped absolve her of her sins.”

Ma reached out to stroke my hair like she had done when I was a little girl and kissed me on my forehead. Light, a ghostly kiss. It was the most affection I had allowed from her since I became a teen.

She didn’t give me a chance to respond. There was nothing she wanted from me in return. I did not have anything to
give her.

“Ba and Vinh will be home soon. Help me with dinner.”
She looked in her pantry full of dried rice noodles, jasmine rice, dried mushrooms, and so much more.

I left that day with two bundles of banh tet and so much more.