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.

Illustration by Blair Kelly

During my second year of college, we killed our father. It was his own idea, but it was Charlie’s idea to do it the week before Christmas. Later, I would regret that we hadn’t waited until afterward. Charlie said that Christmas would have depressed the hell out of us regardless and anyway, it was too late to do anything different.

The night before we did it, Charlie was late to pick me up. I stood on the train platform alone, shivering in the cold, cursing his name. The man in the ticket booth peered pityingly at me through the frosted window and didn’t offer to let me stand inside, although I wished desperately that he would. The benches were far too cold and snow-covered to make comfortable seats, so I remained standing, hopping from one foot to the other.

I sighed in relief and pent-up irritation when a familiar station wagon finally swerved into the parking lot, the bright yellow headlights cutting through the dark. I set off toward the car, suitcase nipping at my heels. Charlie parked and opened the door on the driver’s side, poking his head out. He wore a deep green handknit scarf wrapped around his neck, and a matching hat pulled low over his eyebrows. He waved me over, as if there was anyone else at the station he could have been there to pick up. I could see, as I got closer, that his mittens were deep green as well, made from the same yarn. The set was a gift from our mother; a similar one—made from blue yarn—had arrived for me at the dorms in early November. As twins, everything we had was doubled—life, love, death, and everything in between.

The package had come with a note that read only For Carmen, Love, Mom. When I phoned her to say thank you, I got her answering machine.

“Sorry I was late,” Charlie said breathlessly, as if he had been running and not driving.

“It’s alright,” I found myself saying, and was surprised by how much I meant it, how quickly my vexation had dissipated. I was glad to be there with him. “It’s nice to see you.”

He didn’t reciprocate. I didn’t take offence. My presence was a reminder of what lay before us.

Again, it was Dad’s idea. Because he was sick. Months earlier, doctors had told us that he didn’t have much time left, but what that meant, exactly, they couldn’t say. Mom fled to Florida rather than dealing with it, and Charlie and I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to take care of Dad. Charlie dropped out of school and moved back home. We’d argued about it back and forth and ultimately Charlie had won, or lost, depending on which way you looked at it.

The city was empty without him. When I wasn’t in class, I spent most of my time back at the dorms, sitting by the phone, fearing the worst. Not just about Dad’s condition but about other, selfish things; I worried that Charlie’s sacrifice made me look like the lesser twin, a bad daughter. Like a petulant child, I felt left out.

Charlie called to inform me of Dad’s wishes a month before we fulfilled them. I had just come in from class and only had time to take off Mom’s scarf and one of the gloves. I picked up the phone and was brushing snowflakes from the lapel of my coat and there was his voice on the other end of the line, telling me that Dad wanted to go. That we had to help him go. He was in too much pain to bear, Charlie said.

“Did you tell him we’re not doing it?”

“We have to. Dad and I already talked about it. It’s what he wants, for us to do this together.”

“‘Dad and I?’” I was getting warm. I threw off my coat, the second glove. “What about what I think? What if I say no?”

“It’s not about you,” Charlie bit back.

“If I was there, this never would have happened.”

“Well, you’re not here.”

I slammed the phone down, then laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. After an hour, I called Charlie back.

“Look,” he said. “When has Dad ever asked us for anything?”

“Okay,” I said. More than anything, I didn’t want to argue with him. Charlie doing it alone was worse than the alternative. “How soon should I come home?”

Dad wanted me to finish my exams, Charlie relayed, so I should keep the train tickets I already had for Christmas break. He wrote down the date I’d be arriving, and promised to pick me up from the station. When we finally hung up, my index finger was bruised purple from where I’d wound the telephone cord around it.

*

The ride home from the train station was shorter than I remembered. The driveway had been shovelled on only one side, into which Charlie pulled the car. He retrieved my suitcase from the trunk and I stalled, my hand hovering over the door handle. Charlie came around to my side and knocked on the window, startling me.

“You coming?” he called, his voice muffled through the glass and the vicious winter winds.

I stepped out of the car, momentarily plunged back into the biting cold. The house was dark and quiet when we entered—the only sound came from our father’s bedroom, his deep snores coming in fits and starts. Charlie had left the door slightly ajar, and through the crack I could see Dad’s limbs splayed this way and that, detangled from the sheets he had kicked off in his sleep. I watched the silhouette of his back heave up and down with each breath. Charlie had warned me that he spent most of his days sleeping, emerging from the dimly lit bedroom only to use the bathroom or for meals. It pained him to do much else, and even trips to the bathroom were assisted by Charlie and took twice as long as they used to.

“There’s leftover pizza in the fridge, if you want,” Charlie jostled me with his shoulder on his way up the stairs, my suitcase in his hands. I tore my gaze away from the dark bedroom. “Not sure how long it’s been there though.”

I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t think I could stomach any food. “I’ll pass.”

I followed him up the stairs and into my old bedroom. It was even more foreign to me than the last time I was there—the walls seemed to creep closer together with each passing year, compressing the room into a small box painted pale pink and filled with the remnants of some other life. Charlie dumped my suitcase next to the double bed and I cast a cursory glance around the room. There was a pang in my chest when I clocked the thin layer of dust that covered everything from the dresser to the bookshelf. The room was barely touched in my absence, it existed only in tandem with me. I swallowed the panic that threatened to rise about how little time I had spent with Dad in his last days.

Charlie looked at me. “It wasn’t any easier for me here, you know.”

Quietly, I said, “I know.”

“Goodnight then,” Charlie said finally, clearing his throat to dispel the silence that had settled between us like the dust that surrounded us. Our souls were equally burdened with the weight of actions we hadn’t yet taken. He shut the door softly behind him when he left.

*

Charlie woke before me and hogged the bathroom. The second floor of the house was small; there was only mine and Charlie’s bedrooms and our shared bathroom, which had remained an area of contention even into our young adulthood.

I banged on the door and it rattled on its old hinges. “Get out of there, would you?”

I didn’t even care about using the bathroom. It was just that hounding Charlie for it felt natural, normal. Upon waking, a feeling of dread had crept into my stomach and wouldn’t leave.

“I’m almost done,” came the reply through the door. The faucet in the bath was running and I figured he was washing his hair, holding his head upside down under the stream like Mom had taught us when she’d grown tired of washing our hair for us as kids. When the door finally opened ten minutes later, the hem and shoulders of his t-shirt were wet and his brown hair dripped all over the floor at our feet. Behind him the bathroom was full of steam, the mirror was more of an opaque wall than a reflective surface.

“Morning,” the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. I grimaced. We were going through the motions.

“I’ll only be a moment. Wait for me?”

It wasn’t a real question. Of course he would. We were fated to do everything together, especially this. Life, love, death.

Charlie sat on the floor outside the bathroom until I was ready. When we finally went downstairs, he said he would go get Dad. I wrung my hands together and paced the tiled kitchen floor. My back ached and my feet hurt from invisible pressures, and I wanted to sit down but I remained standing. I kept pacing. I could hear their conversation faintly—Charlie’s soft voice and Dad’s sleepy mumbles. Then there was the shuffling, the heavy tread on the wooden floor. They came around the corner and into the kitchen, Charlie’s arm looped through Dad’s, Dad leaning heavily on Charlie. Charlie’s steps were deliberately slowed, and Dad’s, I could tell, were as fast as they could be. He looked up at where I stood by the counter.

“Carmen.”

I almost started to cry, right then and there. Charlie looked away and told me to take Dad to the living room while he prepared breakfast, so I replaced Charlie’s arm with my own and directed Dad toward the couch. I sat next to him, holding his hands in between mine, trying not to think about how this was it.

Dad asked me about school so I told him about my classes and the horrible food they served in the dining hall. (Also: Charlie pulled a bottle of pills from the cupboard and they rattled furiously as he dumped them all into a small ceramic bowl). I told Dad about the knitwear from Mom, how they kept me warm on the frigid walks to the school library during final exams. (Charlie crushed the pills beneath the backside of a spoon. This took a while).

I reminded Dad about the time he took Charlie and I fishing, how he stuck bait on each of our hooks because we were too scared to touch the worms, how he purchased the three measly fish we’d caught and cooked them for dinner. We’d been violently ill that night but the next weekend, we asked to go fishing again. He squeezed my hand, resting on top of his. I think it hurt him to say anything, but there was so much that I wanted to ask. I wanted to know who he was. I had all these memories of him strung together like Polaroids on twine, the gaps between them were palpable and incorrigible. Has anybody ever managed to be more than their father’s child?

(Charlie poured a glass of orange juice and tipped the contents of the ceramic bowl inside. He mixed them with the same spoon and the metal clinked against the glass with each turn).

I told Dad that I loved him.

Charlie put his hand on my shoulder. He handed me the glass, and I gave it to Dad. In this way, it felt like all of us, together. But in the end Dad was alone. Charlie and I stood on the front porch and waited longer, surely, than we needed to. It was all much quieter than I was expecting.

We crossed the street and called the ambulance from the neighbours’. The trucks arrived within a few minutes and washed the whole street in red and blue. Charlie and I stood in the road and held hands without speaking. We didn’t have to. Everything we felt was doubled. Life, love, death.

Illustration by Jasmine Lesperance

For us acrobats, it was a circus rule to choose our primary apparatus at the age of thirteen. The doors opened to the Big Top and I entered alone. The leftover sawdust on the floor stuck between my toes, the air scented with rain, instead of the usual smells of animal dung and stale popcorn. Each piece of equipment was illuminated with the magic of the Circus—the only spots of light in the dark space: trapeze, tightrope, hoop, silks, chains. The darkness filling the rest of the tent felt tangible, as if all that existed in the world was me and my choice.

Each apparatus had served me well during my training, suspending me high in the air as I contorted my body. The choice was easy—I wanted the hoop. The perfect circle that supported me, spinning high above the crowds, the comfort in knowing I was the same through and through, no matter how many times I rotated. My hand landed on the hoop and I pulled myself up, settling my body against the wrapped steel. It fit in the curve behind my thighs as if I was born to have it there. A spotlight snapped on, focusing on me, and the light from the other apparatuses extinguished. I rose into the air, and my Circus family streamed in to celebrate. I thought my mom would be the most excited by her only child making the biggest decision of her life; instead, she looked frozen, her brown eyes wide and unseeing, her face pale. She was in stark contrast to the others as they ooh-ed and ahh-ed at my tricks. I didn’t think much of it—tonight was about me and the hoop.

Grasping it with both hands, I flipped upside down and stretched my legs into a front split. Long ago, my body registered this as pain, blooming bruises wherever the metal contacted my golden skin. Eventually, the hoop became an extension of me. I hooked the back of my left ankle onto the bottom curve and released my hands; I released everything, letting the single point of contact hold my weight as my right leg floated back behind my head and into my grasp. I smiled into the warmth of the spotlight, my skin glittering as it did when I was in the air.

The Circus had its own magic system, but there was a different magic that bound us Blackbirds to our art. It made us stand out from the other acrobats. We were unafraid, as if the air would never drop us, as if gravity didn’t affect us. If we fell, maybe we wouldn’t even get hurt, but I didn’t know because I never fell. I was born in the Circus and I would die in the Circus; this was where I belonged.

When my performance finished and I dismounted, my mom was in the same spot. As I approached, a mask came up so quick and convincing that I wondered if I’d only imagined the strange expression on her face. She hugged me. “Congratulations, Althea. Wonderful choice.”

*

It wasn’t until five years later that I thought of my mom’s reaction that night. I was watching Vesper train his new hippogriff, creatively named Griffy. An annoyed flick of Griffy’s tail sent the metal trash can skating across the centre ring, scattering its contents all over. While helping to clean up the mess, I uncovered an amber glass bottle hidden amongst the greasy popcorn bags and peanut shells. My name was emblazoned on the peeling label: Althea Blackbird. The instructions read, Administer three drops once daily to maintain memory suppression. I knew this bottle—I’d seen it on the top shelf of my mom’s belongings, higher than I could reach in our shared trailer. The faded text was too small and faint for me to read from the floor so I never suspected that I was its intended recipient.

“Thea—” said Vesper. His cloven feet sent up little puffs of dust as he tapped them nervously.

“Did you know about this?”

“Um.” Vesper was born into the Circus a few years before me, to the family of Fauns that had existed as the Circus’s animal tamers for as long as my family had been aerialists. Griffy lay down at his feet with an audible sigh.

“What memory is she suppressing?”

“Um,” he said again. “Maybe you should ask your mom.”

*

I didn’t ask her, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out how she was drugging me. Besides the occasional snacks from our vendors, all my meals were prepared by the staff in the Dining Car. The only refreshment my mom ever offered me was a steaming mug of peppermint tea that she brewed nightly. I valued our bedtime tea session, usually on the steps outside our trailer if the weather was nice. Besides this ritual, I hardly saw her—she organized the acts and travel schedule, while I trained or helped the others with their shows. She was once an acrobat too, but she quit long ago, something I could never fathom. Sometimes, she trailed her gloved fingers over the seat of the trapeze, closing her hand around it as if she could feel it through the velvet.

After that, I stopped drinking her tea. I’d cradle the mug in my hands, warming my callused skin and taking small sips to appease her, but I’d spit it into a handkerchief hidden in my sleeve when she wasn’t looking. The remainder was discretely poured on the ground between my shoes.

Memory was an odd thing. The smell came first—I woke with the echo of perfume in my nose, like a word on the tip of my tongue. There should have been this scent in our trailer, honey-sweet and floral, swirled in with sandalwood from Mom’s soap and the mothball musk of our costumes. I found the broken bottle in the back of a cabinet full of old cosmetics. The aroma of osmanthus flowers filled me, and I cradled the etched glass, wondering how a smell could make me feel so safe.

That same day, as I inspected the carabiners of the outdoor rigs, I remembered a slender hand, callused and long-fingered, directing mine over the metal links. A female voice said, “Don’t forget—always screw them downwards, never up.”

A shiver travelled down my spine, and my hands shook too much to continue the task. I didn’t know what to expect when I stopped taking that potion, but it wasn’t this sense of emptiness, of missing.

The next morning, I watched the trapeze artists from the bleachers. Across the tent, the movement of air sent an empty hoop swaying, and my mind supplied the vision of a girl in that clear black circle. She could have been me with her long black hair and shimmering skin, dancing effortlessly high above. The differences were subtle—a heart-shaped face instead of my oval one, thinner eyebrows, and a single freckle on her cheek that she absolutely hated. I knew those details were there without seeing them. A wave of nausea hit me, and I keeled over, vomiting into the space between the seats. I yelled an apology before dashing to the cleaning closet and locking myself inside to be alone. Part of me rejected the memory of her, because there was no remembering without hurting. But I couldn’t fight it; the floodgates were open.

Her name was Elyse, and she was my sister. Once the Circus’s star performer, Elyse was one with the hoop. Her skin sparkled as she flipped and hung and twisted, sometimes with other acrobats, suspending each other in ways that made the audience hold their collective breath. She was weightless when she flew through the air; I wanted to be just like her. I thought the aerial hoop was my autonomous decision, but maybe deep down I remembered.

I didn’t notice when it first started—Elyse always looked dreamy when she was performing, but one night she held a particularly ethereal quality. It took me a moment to realize she was translucent. It wasn’t an illusion; the spotlights refracted through her like foggy glass.

She was Fading—something else my mom made me forget, something she herself suffered from, hiding her see-through fingers inside her ever-present velvet gloves. The first night when it was clear Elyse was Fading, she and my mom had a vicious argument. I was outside our trailer, watching their quivering silhouettes scream at each other through the thin curtain, Elyse’s shadow fainter than Mom’s. Their heated words were muffled through the wall, but I heard a smash, the sound of glass breaking. I didn’t dare go in, so I sat under the window with my knees tucked beneath my chin until their voices ceased with one final shout. Elyse ran out, slamming the door behind her, and I followed.

She climbed to the tightrope platform where she curled up and sobbed. She was seven years older than me, and I thought she knew everything. I didn’t think her self-assuredness and calmness could give way to a sadness so profound. She startled when I wrapped my arms around her trembling form. She still felt solid.

“Thea.” She held me tight, and I buried my nose in her hair, breathing in sweet osmanthus. “Mom wants me to quit before I fully Fade.”

“Why do we Fade?” I asked, examining the shape of my hand through hers.

“Humans weren’t meant to surpass gravity.”

Back then, I didn’t understand what she meant. Now I knew that magic was a changing quality that grew the more we mastered it, the closer we got to true weightlessness. But our mortal bodies weren’t made to hold a magic so strong.

“Are you going to quit?” The tears that collected in the corners of my eyes spilled over; I knew her answer.

“I can’t.” She sobbed and I wished my grasp on her could be enough to hold her in my life forever.

*

Once I remembered Elyse, the looks my mom gave me made sense: the expression on her face the day of my thirteenth birthday when the hoop carried me high into the air, the way her gaze blurred every time she watched me until she stopped coming to my shows entirely. I looked too much like Elyse on the hoop, tan skin sparkling, black hair plaited into endless loops behind my head, a mirror image of the daughter she’d lost.

*

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know what was coming. The first day I noticed the tips of my toes were faint, I cancelled my show. The Circus was unhappy with me—I could tell from the way my trailer lights flickered and how the animals walked wide circles around me like I repelled them. A knock sounded at my trailer door after the show, and I prayed that it wasn’t my mom.

Vesper stood in the doorway with two candy apples, an offering I couldn’t refuse. We sat on the floor, eating our treats in silence. Once we were half done, he asked, “Are you going to quit?”

I can’t, was Elyse’s answer when I had asked her the same question. The ghost of her words hung on my lips. Instead, I said, “I don’t know.”

This was why my mom made me forget—so I could enjoy the art for as long as possible before I faced this turmoil. I could take the route that she took, hanging up her invisible wings to continue on in this world and start a family, or I could take the route of Elyse.

True to her word, Elyse never quit. She kept spinning that endless circle night after night until I could make out the striped inside of the Big Top through her. I watched her until one night, she was so transparent that I could see everything behind her with perfect clarity. It was then I realized she was no longer there. She was gone, and that hoop continued to spin without her. Murmurs rippled across the audience and then they stood, thrilled by the seamless vanishing act, their deafening applause drowning out my sobs.

“If I quit,” I twirled the stick of the apple between my palms, “would I stay here or would I leave the Circus?”

“Where would you go if you left the Circus?” The Circus was the only life we ever knew.

I shrugged. “Where would I go if I disappeared?”

Vesper chewed, cleverly waiting for the moment to pass, then he changed the subject and gave me his take on tonight’s show, the first I’d ever missed, and it was a welcome distraction from the inevitable choice that awaited me.

*

If I said aloud that I was quitting, the circus would write me out forever. I told my mom it was a break, and she nodded knowingly. When I watched the other aerialists, my heart folded in half. The idea that my mom turned her back on her trapeze and stayed here, watching them every night for years, was unfathomable to me.

The acrobats danced above me while I set up the magician’s equipment on the ground below. Even though I kept my eyes downcast, their shadows taunted me with their tricks.

One night, Vesper approached me with a furrowed brow. He said, “You’re fading.”

“What?” I dropped the cables I was carrying to look down at my body. My toes hadn’t reverted to opacity but there were no new signs of Fading since I stopped doing hoop.

“You never smile anymore.”

“Oh,” I said. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“Well, it is scary, isn’t it? To think that you would live the rest of your life like this?”

Like this. Flightless. I felt heavier lately, the pull of gravity stronger than ever before. Maybe it would get so strong that I’d be dragged into the earth as I continued to reach for the sky.

“I don’t want to Fade,” I whispered.

Vesper folded his goat legs beneath him and sat down. “I was glad when you said that you’d stop, because I didn’t want you to disappear, but this is worse. You’re fading on the inside. You were meant to be up there.”

I followed his gaze. An acrobat launched himself from the platform, sailing through the air until he grasped the metal chains waiting for him, and my heart ached to watch. My hoop hung empty, the tape wrapping around steel worn from my frequent use. It grew closer and closer until I realized that I was walking toward it. My feet carried me to the ladder’s base. I climbed rung after rung until I was on the platform, level with the hoop.

Without thinking, I discarded my shoes and leapt. The distance was farther than usual, and I doubted myself for a moment. Did I still have my magic? Or was I earthbound now? I missed my catch, fingers grazing the base of the ring. Gravity was a force that I underestimated.

As I started to fall, I remembered Elyse’s last show. The thought of her spinning, bound by the love of her art until the very end, slowed my descent, and I stretched one inch higher to grab the bottom curve. I steadied my hold and pulled myself up. Everything was right. My skin glittered. I was grounded, as the circle reminded me that with every rotation: I’m still here. I’m still here. 

One day I wouldn’t be, but for now, I kept spinning.

Illustration by Paige Jung

We met them first near the hot food. The catering staff were serving a dim sum shrimp dumpling on a bed of rice at the near end of the table. The caterers must have brought hundreds of ramekins to the venue that night, there was an endless stream of them, a new one for each portion.

Her eyes widened with a light of familiarity as she took me in, then gave me a smile. “You’re wearing my outfit!”

I was in a jumpsuit, sleeveless, black, a deep plunge of a neckline, a long string of pearls, black patent open toe pumps. She wore a short black skirt, pleated like a kilt, her legs in black lace stockings, her feet in heavily buckled boots. Her arms, like mine, were bare skinned, but not unadorned—elaborately tattooed. Her hair was stylish in an unkempt, flattering way.

He was in a tailored jacket, slacks a close enough match to suggest a suit, with a dress shirt and blue plaid bow tie, his own nod to the dress code.

He stood by her, encouraging her, enjoying her.

“I’m wearing your outfit?” I responded, puzzled.

“I looked for something exactly like that all day, all over town. You are wearing exactly what I pictured myself in. But I could find nothing. Where did you get that?”

“Eileen Fisher,” I laughed. “Last year’s season.”

“You bought it here?”

“Not here, dear. Your first mistake is to try shopping here.”

The two of us laughed together, discussed the difficulties of getting off the island, eventually parting company after exclaiming over the shrimp, my helpful husband steering me expertly away and back into the crowd.

We didn’t see them again for a while. The room was full, and there was another room besides, with the same food and another bar—a quieter setting, decorated with photos from the 40 years of theatre we were celebrating.

“Remember? We took your dad to see Putnam County Spelling Bee when he was here.”

“Oh, god, and then we got home to find the dog had eaten the chocolate he’d hidden in his suitcase!”

We lingered awhile and then returned to the lobby where things were noisier, gayer, brighter.

We stood at a long, bar-height table, the one nearest the entrance, at the edge of the nucleus of the crowd. Servers and other attendants orbited behind and around us as they found their way with trays, serving food, collecting glassware.

Then we heard it.

“Fuck you, you bitch.”

I turned to look as the two separated. He strode out the door. She circled past me, found an unoccupied length of table a little ways away and took out her phone. She began texting.

I stayed in my place for a few moments, absorbing. It was then that I noticed how young she was. Not yet 30, I would guess.

There I was, nearly 60, a steadfast man at my side, the calm waters of my marriage keeping me buoyant, making my own enjoyment possible. This wasn’t my crowd, either. She bit her lip, then glanced up and around and recomposed her face. I could imagine her heart pounding, her eyes stinging.

No one else had noticed. She was alone and I wished she could know that the room was not staring at her, that if she needed a safe way out, one was at hand. It was the kind of thing I would have wanted at her age. Someone to step up and say, “I’ve noticed you. I’ve chosen your side.”

I moved next to her and when she looked up, I smiled, put my fingertips on her forearm, and asked, “Will you be okay?”

“You heard that?” she asked.

“Yes, we did. But don’t worry. No one else heard.”

“I can’t believe he did that. It’s humiliating.”

I agreed that she was right to be offended. “It was a childish way to speak—and unacceptable.”

“Childish. I know. Can you believe it? He’s in his forties. But what can I do?”

“Do not date children. Of any age. I think you know enough about this man to make a good decision.”

She looked at me. “He’s moved in.”

I held her eye.

She inhaled. Sighed.

“What matters now is only this party, whether you can still enjoy yourself, whether you’ll be safe when you go home.”

She assured me he would not be violent. But he would be hard to get rid of.

“What you do after tonight is up to you. My intent is only to help you stay in this room, if you want, to confirm your right to enjoy yourself and not have someone take this away from you by being vulgar in public.”

She worked for a property manager and had come with tickets the office had purchased. She was texting to see if she could find a friend who might want to come see the show. I looked at her tickets.

“These are some of the best seats in the house. You’re right to want to share them. But if no one can come on such short notice, you will still enjoy the show. It will be fun. Entertaining.”

Her boyfriend approached and I stepped away. Everyone has the right to a little time to apologize.

He didn’t.

I glanced at my husband. We were now some distance from each other, the feuding couple between us. I didn’t look at the couple directly, but I think they felt our fleeting observation. The boyfriend walked out of the theatre.

Moments later, my husband and I and the young woman reassembled. We smiled at the other guests nearby, engaged them in light, brief, cheerful remarks.

Whenever the young woman would start to rail about her boyfriend’s misdeeds, I would let her finish her sentence and then change the subject. I was not there to be her advocate in a bad relationship. I felt she should have no time for him and tried to demonstrate this by having no time for him, or even accounts of him, myself. The path forward lay in choosing a state of mind that excluded him.

The lights dimmed a warning. We were called to the theatre.

I took my seat without optimism and let the entertainment absorb me.

Illustration by Jenny Bien-Aimé

When I was eight years old, my parents entrusted me with $16 in the form of eight $2 coins, an allowance for a school field trip to La Ronde, Montreal’s amusement park. Until 1996, the year during which the $2 tender in Canada was converted from a paper bill to a coin, my parents would have never, not in a million years, given me $16 to take along with me on a field trip, or anywhere else for that matter. As far as my mother was concerned, I had no business with paper money. However, on this particular morning in 1997, my father, quite uncharacteristically, reached into his pockets and offered me eight toonies.

“Why are you giving the boy all that money?” asked my mother, who had been eyeing the transaction discontentedly.

“Oh, it’s just some spare change,” my father replied. “In case of emergency.”

My mother grumbled an unintelligible response, but let me have the coins; whereas only a year ago, if my father had reached into his wallet and pulled out eight $2 bills and handed them over to me, she would have exploded savagely. She would have either thrown whatever she might be holding at my father’s head or reached for the nearest available object that could be thrown at my father’s head and, having thrown it, would have walked over to him, ripped the $16 out of his hands, and shoved them back into his wallet or into her own pocket. In fact, my father would never have offered me $16 in paper currency in front of my mother as it was so obviously an act that would have aggravated her.

My father’s unprecedented offer, as well as my mother’s tolerance, was intriguing. It seemed as if my parents’ emotions about money could be manipulated by something as simple as a change in its appearance.

While this was the first time that I had observed this behaviour toward money manifest itself in my parents, I was already intimately familiar with the ways in which money aroused different emotions depending on its appearance. I had this sneaky habit of roaming around our house for coins like a scavenger. During these hunts, I felt luckiest when I found coins in or under the couch, in the car, anywhere in our laundry room, or anywhere in our garage. I believed the coins I discovered in these circumstances were discovered honestly. The coins I found in drawers (in the kitchen, in the laundry room, in the wall unit that housed our sound system and television) were a morally grey area. I would try to ascertain whether these coins had been forgotten in their drawers, perhaps for weeks or months, or if they had been intentionally left there for safekeeping. If it was clear they had been forgotten, then I was happy to discover these coins and claim them; but if something intangible about their appearance, about the way they were lying in the drawer, told me that my parents knew of their presence, even if their knowledge of the coins might have been broad and abstract—even if I was confident that they would never notice if one of them went missing—then I felt guilty if I took any of them. I felt guilty for even considering whether or not to take a coin. I also felt guilty if I took a coin, any coin, that I discovered in my parents’ bedroom. Even if the coin was jammed under the base of my parents’ bedframe, and had obviously been lost, its location in my parents’ bedroom did not feel neutral. Such a coin had not been thrown in my path through the ordinary twists and turns of fate. I felt like a villainous thief if I pocketed these coins, like a person without a conscience or a moral compass.

In addition to the money’s location, there was also the issue of denomination to consider. I usually scooped up and pocketed pennies without a second thought. Nickels were small in surface area and value, but also thicker and more robust than all the other coins. A nickel weighed 4.6 grams, almost as much as a quarter, which weighed 5.05 grams, and more than twice as much as a dime, which weighed 2.07 grams (measurements which I conducted assiduously on the electronic scale in our kitchen). I always found it difficult to pocket nickels, as their weight was problematic, disproportionate in appearance to their five-cent essence. I usually ignored them in favour of pennies and dimes.

Dimes were the smallest, daintiest, and thinnest of all the coins. You could balance them easily on your smallest fingernail. I would often chew on dimes because I liked their metallic taste and the feeling of the thin, serrated edge lodging itself into different crevices between my teeth. In fact, I liked dimes so much and had such good feelings toward them that I almost never spent the ones I found, preferring to hoard them instead. I would occasionally take all the dimes I had accumulated out of their secret hiding place in my closet and lay them on the ground to examine them joyously, before chewing on them absentmindedly for hours on end. It was a minor miracle that I didn’t swallow about a dozen of them during the course of my childhood.

Quarters tugged at my heartstrings in both directions, almost equally. Quarters were not as thick and unpleasant as nickels, but they were unwieldy in size, and cumbersome to flip and play with. Additionally, the quarter’s purchasing power was 25 times that of a penny, and two-and-a-half times that of a dime. This purchasing power was a double-edged sword. I felt luckier when I found a quarter than when I found a penny, at least 25 times luckier, but I also felt 25 times guiltier. It was at least 25 times more important that I establish and reason through the circumstances of its discovery, to be certain that I was finding it and pocketing it in an appropriate and conscionable manner. This moral standard almost always proved to be one I could not satisfy for myself internally. I always felt a little wretched when I picked up a quarter, even if I picked it up from a sidewalk or from a trail in the woods. Then again, there was the superstitious delight of finding a quarter, which was a rare occurrence, and therefore accompanied by the feeling that fortune was smiling upon me.

Finally, the loonie. It was pure evil. I wanted as little to do with it as possible. I would rather have found four different quarters (for all the moral quandaries that all four findings might have presented). I hated the loonie’s eleven-sided polygon shape, how its edges were often blunted and beaten from use, instead of smooth and circular like all the other coins. I hated the loonie’s bronze plating (that would later become brass plating) to which dirt adhered, tarnishing it, rendering its golden hue murky and anemic.

If I pocketed a loonie, against my better judgment, I needed to be rid of it as quickly as possible. But disposing of a loonie was easier said than done. I usually spent my coins at the dépanneur. As I didn’t like to accumulate coins (dimes excepted), and wanted to leave the dépanneur with fewer of them than when I had entered it, spending a loonie (or even worse, two loonies) usually meant buying more items than I knew what to do with. Those items (gum, chips, candy, flimsy trinkets) would fill my pockets uncomfortably, or give me a stomach ache if I ate them all at once, making me feel nauseous and guilty.

Enter into this hierarchy of coins the toonie, eight of which my father would hand over to me on the morning before my school trip to La Ronde. The toonie was a void, like the vacuum of space. It meant nothing to me. For a person who had such strong and complex feelings toward all other coins, this feeling, or absence of feeling, was peculiar and bewildering. I would often ponder the toonie, while it sat in the upturned palm of my right hand, gently shifting my palm so that it might catch the light at different angles. The more I thought about it, the more the toonie seemed unreal, manufactured. Well, all coins were manufactured. What I mean to say is that it seemed fake, inauthentic. It had a nickel outer ring, a bronze inner core, and a polar bear on an ice floe embossed on its reverse side. These elements coalesced to form a coin which seemed excessively novel. I had the disconcerting impression that I was holding a knockoff, an imitation of money, and not actual money. I hoped that if I exposed the toonie to the right light, I might form a unique attachment to it, but the toonie remained silent, inscrutable.

Given my indifference toward the toonie coin, my behaviour during the field trip to La Ronde was predictable.

During lunch, as my classmates and I sat on picnic tables, eating hot dogs, burgers, and French fries, one of my classmates took three quarters out of his pocket and used them to play an arcade game that was beside the food stall where we had just purchased our lunches. The object of the game was to fish out various toys or stuffed animals from a large bin while operating, with a joystick and a button, a robotic arm and hand that was perched above the bin. When the player thought they had maneuvered the arm into a good position with the joystick, they would bash the button, and the hand would close in what looked like an attempt to secure whatever toy or stuffed animal the player hoped to acquire.

My classmate played three turns with his three quarters, and lost all three. The game was rigged against the player. Once a quarter was introduced, the whole machine began vibrating like it was experiencing an earthquake, making the robotic arm and hand more difficult to operate. Additionally, the hand and arm seemed at times intentionally unresponsive (often these were crucial times, when a toy or object seemed just within the player’s grasp).

I was sorry to see my classmate lose. Before he could walk away from the game, I approached him and offered him a toonie to let him keep playing. After all, it cost me nothing, emotionally at least. This precipitated a frenzy amongst my classmates. Where had I gotten this money? Did I have more of this money, of these toonies, wherever they had come from?!?! About 12 to 15 of my classmates congregated around me and rattled off inquiries about my toonies and whether I might give them a turn, and in that moment, I took all of my remaining coins from my pocket and slammed them onto the dashboard of the console, gifting them to my classmates.

My offering was applauded, but once I relinquished the money, no one paid any further attention to me. I didn’t even attempt to play the game once. I had no desire to play the game. I enjoyed quests for objects that were solitary, undertaken for private, personally significant reasons. The communal endeavour of this arcade, the pursuit of the toys my classmates hoped to snatch from it, was public, almost lurid, and antithetical to my introverted nature. Anyways, it didn’t seem like my classmates would have let me play even if I had wanted to. No one seemed inclined to offer me a place in line, or a turn at the arcade, though they were constantly trading and offering places in line to each other.

Three of my classmates won at the arcade and brought a toy or stuffed animal home with them. On the bus ride back to school, as I watched those three classmates with their toys and stuffed animals, and listened to my other classmates who couldn’t stop talking about the thrills and frustrations of their various turns at the arcade, I starting feeling a bit like a fool. When I returned home that afternoon, my mother asked me where the hell the $16 my father had given me that morning had gone, and why the hell I didn’t have anything to show for it.

“You don’t even have five or ten or 25 cents in change?” my mother yelled at me indignantly. “What could you possibly have done with all that money?”

I lied. Like many liars, I based my lie in truth. I told my mother about the arcade game, but said that I was the one who had spent all of my money on it. I told her that I hadn’t won a single one of my 64 turns, and as each turn had cost a quarter, I didn’t have any money left. My mother was irate. She would relate this story 10 to 30 times a year, whenever she wanted to reiterate how spoiled I was, how unappreciative I was of the value of money.

Despite my mother’s ridicule, I still thought it better to disappoint her in this way. I preferred that she think that I had wasted all that money chasing my silly and childish dreams, than to tell her that I had simply given the money away, given it away for everyone else to take a turn at the arcade, while not even playing a turn myself.

This realization had come to me on the bus ride back from La Ronde. As I contemplated the eight toonies I had lost that day in my mind’s eye, I experienced deep shame and embarrassment. I knew that I had behaved inappropriately, in a manner that was not in keeping with the unwritten rules which governed almost everyone’s emotional conduct toward money. What kind of a fool had I been to surrender $16 so amenably, so accommodatingly, without even being coerced or influenced? What kind of a fool had I been not to value, not just one or two, but all eight of my toonies, all $16 worth of them, when my classmates had spent the remainder of the afternoon obsessed with creating a system to allocate and trade different portions and values of my $16 amongst themselves, a miniature economy from which they had excluded me entirely. I had been a mighty fool, a mighty fool indeed.

Suddenly, the toonie coin, which had for so long remained inert, took on life and meaning. Over the coming days, months, and years, the two-toned coin’s allure would become so powerful that it would subsume my desires and disdains for all other coins. It was impossible for me to refuse the gaze of the toonie coin’s eye. The command of the stern bronze pupil and its scintillating nickel iris was absolute. I abandoned my pursuit of all other coins, and yearned only for the toonie.

It’s actually pretty hard to construct a good lie. I learned this when I was sitting in a beige hospital chair, my skinny arm outstretched, purple at the spot where the wiry IV cord met my skin. I was in one of those Phase 0 studies for money, the kind where you have to stop smoking and drinking for a month in order to pass the health check. They were testing an antiviral drug, letting it bubble through my body, even though it had only been tried on rats previously. When you’re sitting around waiting for a reaction to happen, you can’t help thinking up lies. I’m a pilot. I’m good at crosswords. I like the same music as you. I feel like a stable human being.

Bridget sat in the chair across from me. “I don’t believe you,” she said. She had a purple cast that glowed in the dark. I wondered how she was eligible for this study with a broken limb. She struck me as the type of girl to worm her way into anything; she was short, and blonde, with bleached eyebrows and big boobs that I was jealous of. We got bored in the hospital, Bridget and I. It was a week-long study, and the dog- faced nurse wouldn’t let us look at our phones because it would “mess up the EKG.” I couldn’t figure out what heart-leaping content she thought we were consuming. All we got to do was walk around the research wing of the hospital, which looked so new it could have been a plastic reconstruction of a hospital, enlarged to life-sized. The other option was to write in the grey striped notebook that Bridget stole from the hospital gift shop, but I couldn’t write, it was like the antiviral drug was chipping away at my brain. Most of the time we just opted to sit and stare at each other. She was beautiful and I didn’t mind.

Bridget started telling me more and more about herself. As she talked she scrunched her nose so it wrinkled like a sea shell. Her dad was a multimillionaire. He made all his money from a multi-level marketing scheme for weight-loss milkshakes, and then he bought an island in the Atlantic Ocean. He met his second wife in Terminal 1 of Chicago O’Hare on a 24-hour layover to Berlin. Her dad doesn’t talk to her anymore because she shared an article about a lawsuit against his company on Facebook. She had played soccer all her life and realized she was gay when a girl tackled her and held her down by her ponytail. One time when she was 12 she spat in a boy’s eye after he tried to grope her. A known sex offender had once driven her to the gas station. All her cool artist friends called her Hands, because she’s really ambidextrous. She needed the money from this study to revive her band Bareback’s career after they had lost all their equipment in a fire.

I’d never met anyone so exciting. She stretched her body across the chair, her pale stomach twisting and bending like a snake. Her eyelashes were orange and long, streaking the window when she pressed her face against it to see the sunset. When she laughed her bellybutton blinked, like it was laughing too.

When Bridget and I finished the study, the dog-faced nurse scowled at us and gave us our clothes back in Pharmaprix plastic bags. We walked out the squeaky glass hospital doors and Bridget turned to me and asked to move in, just for a bit, until she could find a suitable van. I still lived with my ex- girlfriend. We were civil, but often the atmosphere was tense, the air prickly and heavy, like at any moment lightning could rip through the apartment. I tried my best not to eavesdrop on her conversations with her online therapist, whose crackly voice carried through the thin wall between our rooms. I was saving up to move out, and not just out of the apartment but abroad, I wanted to go to Ireland, I wanted to go to grad school for writing. But when Bridget asked me, I said yes. You can’t say no to Bridget.

Bridget was messy. She left half-eaten bowls of pasta, crusted with red sauce, all over the living room. She sang loudly and slightly off-key at all hours of the day. She slept like a skydiver, all her limbs flailing out, spanning the couch like she was perpetually in a state of free-fall. She became interested in tattooing and ordered a needle on Amazon, piled the living room with sketches and bottles of ink. My skin was always sore because I let her tattoo me. It felt good when she clutched my arm in her bony hand. My ex-girlfriend, sighing while eyeing the disaster in our living room, called her Behemoth Bridget.

Sometimes I felt like she was trying to take over my life. She wore my clothes. She started talking the same way I did, mimicking my Ontarian accent, popping “like” and “literally” into all her sentences. I even caught Bridget telling my ex a story that I had told her during the study, a story about me, except she pretended that it was her story, that the events had happened to her. I pointed it out, but Bridget was so animated, so convincing, that my ex believed her more. So when Bridget tattooed on herself the same tattoo she’d given me, a crooked black heart on her hipbone, then showed it to me proudly, exclaiming “I did mine even better than I did yours!” I told her it looked like shit. She asked me for money to get it removed, since she spent all of hers on the tattoo gun. For the first time since I’d met her, I told her no, and I watched her face contort with defeat, like a crumpled bedsheet.

I was preparing for a new study when I caught Bridget with my ex. I was eating healthy, vaping instead of smoking, drinking water, not writing but thinking about it. I came home from a run and heard Bridget whimpering, a high-pitched squeak, and I knew she was having sex with my ex on the same bed I used to, and I knew she was doing it to bug me. I heard my ex yell, cartoonishly: “Bridget, you’re so emotionally mature and great at hooking up!” I was sure Bridget had told her to say that. Later that day, I pushed my ear to the wall and heard my ex telling her online therapist that it was so easy to be with Bridget, easy in a way it never was with me. Bridget was fun, and uninhibited, and she didn’t ask for much. “But she’s very giving in bed,” my ex added, giggling. That’s when I decided I was done.

I told Bridget she had two weeks to find a new place to live. She stuck her tongue out at me. The next two weeks were punctuated with Behemoth Bridget pouring bleach in my cereal, Behemoth Bridget leaving her socks on my pillow, Behemoth Bridget calling me a cunt, Behemoth Bridget hanging sausages on strings from the ceiling, Behemoth Bridget burning holes in the walls with a Zippo lighter, Behemoth Bridget screaming because Bareback was booking gigs, Behemoth Bridget leaning in close to my face, telling me to kiss her, and then jumping away when my lips were so close to touching hers. Then laughing at the desire and the dread plastered across my face.

I was fed up and decided to Google her. Bridget Bartholomew. She was from Kelowna, B.C. She didn’t cover her tracks. Her dad was looking for her. He had never been to Chicago. Bareback released an Instagram statement claiming they don’t know and have never known Bridget Bartholomew. Nothing of Bridget Bartholomew’s had ever burned. She had

a court date in two weeks for grand theft auto. In pixelated newspaper photos, Bridget Bartholomew is captured on a security camera, popping the door off a chrome Mitsubishi and going for a joyride. Watching her sprawled out on the couch, orange eyelashes draped on her cheeks, I didn’t know whether I loved her or hated her. I sent her dad a Facebook message before I could think twice. I dropped a pin so he would know exactly where to find her.

Behemoth Bridget left my apartment in a cop car. I thought she would put up a fight, kick and scream, scratch at the officers’ eyeballs, but she was silent, glowering at me from the window. I watched the car disappear over the Van Horne bridge, its red and blue lights blurring into the glow of duplexes in the distance. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had my credit card in the back pocket of her jeans. The whole way back to Michigan, where she would go to reunite with her dad and await her trial, she was tapping viciously on her cracked iPhone screen, her nails clicking against the glass, buying things I couldn’t afford: a VacPack machine, a $1,000 men’s razor, a 100-year-old bottle of wine. She bid on Liz Phair’s underwear on eBay and won. She donated $200 apiece to random right-wing political campaigns, and I was spammed with emails from a mayor in Florida thanking me profusely. She bought a star in Orion’s Belt and named it after me, texted me a photo of the certificate. She sealed my fate for me: my credit score plummeted. I couldn’t move out. My ex and I stayed living together, stewing in the sour air of her absence. She did all this, I imagine, with a soft smile on her face, thumbing the embossed letters on the card which spelled out my name.

I think about Bridget sometimes, imagine kissing her lips, running my fingers from her forehead to the split ends at the bottom of her hair. I imagine what I’d say to her, if I were to call her and reach her in Michigan or jail or in some other girl’s apartment. I’ve thought about it constantly, sifted through all the lies, jotted them down in the grey striped notebook she gave me, started to form sentences, alternative realities, positioned myself inside them, tried to explain the complete destruction of my life, the debt, the times I’ve cried on the phone to sympathetic but useless Toronto-Dominion Bank employees, the times my pen ran out of ink in my hurried longing to understand her. I’ve finally figured it out. I would say: “Listen, you are a mean, bitter girl,” then pause for dramatic effect, “but that was a brilliant story.”

Illustration by Kristen Huang

I like working at the konbini because it convinces me I’m good and nice.

Here, I’m a secondary character. I help people feed themselves and pay their bills and send mail. I don’t get into trouble.

I never take off my uniform. I even wear it to bed. The armpits of the white blouse are yellow and perpetually damp with sweat and the knees of the black dress pants are worn from scrubbing the floor and the stench of grease and burnt karaage clings to the blue apron, but I don’t mind. If I change into my old clothes, I’ll become who I used to be.

The regular customers all know me, even though I’ve only been here for a month. There’s a nurse who comes by after her shifts who calls me her angel for being so kind and quick when I scan and bag her bentō and warm green tea.

When the store is empty, I scrub the floors and counters and refrigerators so hard my palms blister and bleed. I go for the stains that have been there for years, the ones that won’t come out.

I count and recount the inventory in case I missed something. If someone works a shift with me on weekends, I trail after them like a second shadow, making sure they stock the shelves perfectly.

When a customer enters the store, I say “irasshaimase” so loudly it rumbles in my heart. Even if there’s a group of people, I still say it to each person like they are a god. If I accidentally leave someone out, I feel rotten. I never think about myself, only how they feel. This is my salvation.

I only do graveyard shifts because I like the peace and quiet. Or maybe a part of me savours how the konbini becomes suspended between comfort and unease, like a church after midnight mass, and I still crave the chaos. Strange things happen after midnight, especially in Wakayama.

At 3 a.m., a woman enters the konbini, wearing a black raincoat slick with rain. It’s the middle of tsuyu, Japan’s fifth season, when the thunderstorms are relentless and the air is plump with humidity and the cicadas and frogs compete to see who can scream the loudest.

“Irasshaimase!” I say, bowing deeply.

She ignores me. When a customer doesn’t acknowledge me, I wonder what I did wrong. Maybe my smile didn’t reach my eyes or my voice wasn’t warm enough or I said it too quietly. The woman’s hood hides her face, so I can’t analyze her expressions.

The automatic doors slide open and another woman enters the konbini wearing a wrinkled business suit and a name tag that says “Kaoru.” She fusses with her umbrella, soaking the floor of the konbini with water.

“Irasshaimase!” I say. I bow. Kaoru gives a tired smile, her face worn from working overtime, I assume.

Kaoru fills her basket with a mix of household items and groceries and then grabs an omurice bentō on the way to the register. The woman in the raincoat floats through the aisles.

I greet Kaoru and start scanning her items. I ask her if she wants the bentō warmed up. She nods, and I put it into the microwave.

The automatic doors slide open again, and a karasu flies into the konbini. It wails and crashes into the walls and the shelves, trying to find its way out.

Crows follow me everywhere. My best friend, Hinata, used to say it sounds like they’re crying my name: “Kaya, Kaya, Kaya.” Maybe that’s why they like me so much, she said. When we were kids, the crows would circle around us while we played and drop shiny bits of trash in our laps. When we walked around campus or went drinking after work, they’d hop along the street and peck at our feet. Now, it feels more like they’re haunting me.

I apologize to Kaoru and then rush to the back room to grab a broom. I chase the bird around, but it keeps cawing and crashing into the walls and shitting everywhere.

It starts ramming itself into one of the curved security mirrors in the corner, perhaps believing its reflection is a rescuer who will help it escape.

I’m reflected behind the karasu, my head distorted like an alien’s from an old sci-fi movie. I don’t recognize the face covered in red boils with swirls of yellow pus in their centres, or the nest of matted black hair brittle with grease and dandruff and scabs. I haven’t looked at myself in months. I keep blankets over the mirrors.

The microwave beeps. The woman with the hood has lined up behind Kaoru. I feel horrible, making them wait. Chunky vomit prickles my throat.

I wave the broom around, trying to free the bird from its morbid fixation with itself, but that agitates the karasu more and it rams itself too hard into the mirror, shattering it. Its neck snaps from the force and it falls to the ground with a wet thump.

I reacted too quickly—I should have known better—and now I’ve really messed everything up. The customers are probably mad at me and they’re going to complain about my unprofessionalism and I’m going to get fired.

I rush back to the register and warm up the bentō again. I repeatedly bow and apologize to the customers.

I continue scanning Kaoru’s items as fast as I can. I keep glancing over at the karasu and the shards of broken mirror on the ground. It’s starting to bleed out.

Now I’m worried about the death of the karasu. What if I actually hit it with the broom, and that’s what broke its neck and shattered the mirror? I keep replaying it over and over again, trying to figure out my precise role and what level of guilt I should feel.

“You put the bread in the wrong bag,” Kaoru says.

The loaf of white bread is squished between the laundry detergent and the lint roller. I apologize profusely and throw the squished bread in the garbage.

The microwave beeps. I grab a new loaf of bread and retrieve the bentō from the microwave and bag them separately.

Kaoru sighs and points at the bag with the bentō. “ It’s leaking.”

I’m so stupid. I always triple-check that the bentō doesn’t leak. I was too busy thinking about the karasu. Not that that’s an excuse.

“Can I speak to your manager?” Kaoru asks.

“She’s not working tonight.”

Kaoru’s smiles tightly. “This is the worst service I’ve ever received. I’m never coming here again. And it smells terrible.” Kaoru pulls out her umbrella and walks out of the konbini and back into the storm.

I can’t do anything right. She’ll probably come back tomorrow and complain to my manager, or give the store a one-star rating online. I’m wearing my nametag, she knows who I am. I take a deep breath and call the next woman forward. I smile so wide my eyes water and my cheeks burn.

I still can’t see her face from under her hood, but I can smell her. She smells like fish that’s been baking in the sun for days.

“You reek. It fills the whole store. It spills out into the streets,” the woman says. She grabs onto my apron with a bony blue hand and pulls me close, her fish breath on my cheek.

“It didn’t happen here, did it?”

I’m not sure which “it” she’s talking about. I think about all the bad things I’ve done all the time: When I spilled milk on the tatami and the smell never really went away. When I cheated on my boyfriend with a blur of faces. When I forgot my wallet and held up the line at the grocery store. When I said something carelessly cruel to Hinata in kindergarten and hurt her feelings. When I stole money from my college roommate. When I accidentally broke the printer at my old office job. When I drank too much and passed out in my own vomit on the side of the street. When I forgot about a package of strawberries in the fridge and had to throw it out. When I convinced Hinata to go cliff jumping at the gorge even though she had a job interview the next morning.

The woman coughs, a death rattle. It’s a horrible sound. I’ve heard it before. “No, it happened by the water, far away. But the smell is strong on you.”

There’s a crack of thunder and the doors slide open and, this time, a group of crows frantically fly in, screaming and toppling the shelves of magazines and chips and pastries.

“You do bad things,” she says. “And no one loves you.”

The fluorescent lights burn my eyes. I stumble out from behind the counter and fall to my knees in the middle of the store.

The woman stands over me. I breathe through my mouth to avoid smelling her, but the odour still stings my throat. I look up at her. Her face is long and pale and blue, so wrinkled and weathered that it looks like a knot of tree roots. Her eyes glow red from under her hood. I’ve read stories about creatures like her—shinigami.

“I smell a girl, facedown in the water,” she hisses.

Everyone secretly wants to be found out, has a deep primal instinct to confess—perhaps in order to be told with certainty whether they are good or evil, a bad person who does good things or a good person who did a bad thing, and then either be justly punished or met with reassurance.

“I go over it—over and over again—in my head.”

“You wanted to hurt her,” the shinigami says.

“I keep trying to figure it out,” I say. Was it a manifestation of something pathological repressed inside my unconscious mind—irritation that Hinata didn’t want to do what I wanted that day, jealousy that she wasn’t blacking out every weekend like I still was, panic that I couldn’t control the trajectory of our friendship? Or was it a random act of violence—the way an animal may attack another because of zaps and pulses in its reptilian brain? Or was it an accident—did I lose my balance and try to hold on to her to steady myself? How hard did I really push her? I need to know for sure. It’s not safe to forget.

It’s always on my mind: My hands on Hinata’s back. Those 20 seconds before she hits the water, face-first. Her body bobbing up from under the water after getting knocked around by the rocks, her limbs contorted. Her gasps for air, her retches as she pukes up river water. Those desperate heaves, unable to get the water out of her lungs.

While she was in the hospital, I texted her until she eventually messaged me: “It’s best if we stop corresponding. I can’t forgive you.”

I wonder if she sent that with eye movements, or speech to text. There were no emojis or exclamation marks, maybe her mother sent it for her.

The shinigami wraps her hands around my neck and squeezes. I am like a branch, and I bend however she wants me to. I can’t smell her anymore. All I hear are the drones of the birds: Kaya, Kaya, Kaya.

The room spins over and over again until all of it is sucked into a spiral, a wheel of fluorescence. I slip outside of myself and float up to the ceiling.

I imagine my soul drifting out of the konbini, into the storm, across the country, and into a newborn with different parents in a different city. I can take it all back and become the purest version of myself. Everything that came before this was just the practice round. I will do it right this time.

And then I hear the doors slide open. The rumble of thunder. A flapping sound, loud like a helicopter.

The shinigami lets go of my neck. I return to my body, my vision straightens.

A giant karasu swoops into the konbini and shakes the rain off its feathers.

“It isn’t time,” it squawks. The karasu isn’t speaking in any human language, but I can understand it.

The animal waves its wing and a candle appears in front of it, its flame flickering bright. The shinigami sighs and backs away from me. This isn’t something she can argue against.

“No, no, no, no,” I say, grabbing for her and then falling on my face.

I expect the karasu to deliver the deep truths on what redemption is and how to live with all the things you’ve done and what to do when you suddenly wake up one day and realize your life is a nightmare.

The karasu pecks at some crumbs on the ground, and then turns to me. “It’s not because you’re good. Or because you’re bad. It just isn’t time.”

The karasu waves the candle away, bites at a bug lodged in its feathers, and then hops toward the door.

“I can’t keep going,” I say.

“Drink tea, eat rice…” the karasu says. It gets distracted by the shards of mirror on the floor before continuing. “Go to sleep.”

The two of them leave the konbini together. When the doors open, the rest of the screaming birds follow.

I pick myself up. No one else stops by the konbini for the rest of the night, so I have time to clean up the feathers and blood and shit and spoiled food and toppled shelves. I can’t get the dark tinge off the tiles where the karasu died no matter how hard I scrub. This is enough.

When the sun rises over the rice paddy across the street, past the train tracks, and up above the konbini, I clock out.

I go home. I drink tea, I eat a bowl of rice. I sleep until sunset. I go to work. I don’t count as much as I used to. My hands bleed less. I often see the shinigami in the corner of my eye, sometimes I reach for her. But we won’t meet again for many years, not until the indifferent flame of the candle burns out.

Illustration by Akem

The noisy blender whirred, its blades rotating rapidly, crushing the brown beans for the steamed moi moi that Jide, her boyfriend, liked. Ogechukwu placed her hand on top to prevent it from moving as it juddered on the kitchen counter, the vibrations taking her back to a time when such electronics were forbidden at home, mainly because there was no stable electrical supply to power them and something more important always swallowed the money intended for appliances. She could picture her younger self stooping or bending with her mother over a kerosene stove on the rough cement floor—because a well-trained woman doesn’t sit in the kitchen. Back then, her Wife Material was no more than a handkerchief.

At the age of thirteen, Ogechukwu could make ambrosial egusi soup, with just the right amount of palm oil. Her okro soup was equally as tasty, paired with smoothly pounded yam that slid down the throat easily. She knew just the right amount of cocoyam to add to onugbu soup to make the spicy soup thick and rich. Her Wife Material grew until it became a wrapper she could tie proudly.

Her two younger brothers liked her onugbu because she chased away the striking bitterness of the leaves by washing them thoroughly in a bowl with small amounts of palm oil to reduce the foam, and salt to give the bitter leaf a short stringy shape. She could prepare moi moi with slices of boiled eggs and smoked fish. She could even bake; she baked birthday cakes in university to make extra money. By then, her Wife Material had become a massive patchwork of multicoloured ankara—complementary pieces stitched together and accumulating daily, as fast as she learned.

“Is that how you will behave in your husband’s house?”

If Ogechukwu lost a pound every time her mother asked her that question, she wouldn’t be on a ketogenic diet. It was flung at her most whenever her mother thought she was failing at some womanly task, like cooking or cleaning. It could be that she had asked her to prepare pap for the family to eat with akara, bread, or cooked beans. The one thing Ogechukwu could not make no matter how hard she tried was pap. Pap was designed to reduce her Wife Material, or so she thought each time her mother asked her to make it. Her mother would put chunks of the semi-hardened paste in cold water, making sure to keep it from becoming too watery or too thick. She would stir till all the lumps disappeared, pour boiling water on the mixture till it rose, stirring continuously, achieving a creamy porridge ready for sugar and milk. It was an act of magic Ogechukwu had yet to master.

“Ogechukwu, wetu anya na ala, bend down like a woman and look at things. Let it not be said that I did not train you well, so that when it is time for you to get married, nothing will hold you back,” her mother would say each time she failed.

Ogechukwu recalled the miniscule kerosene stove lit to warm the soup—for storage since there was no fridge. The small kitchen with its smoke-blackened walls was oven- like. From time to time, her mother would drag her right index finger across her own forehead, gathering sweat before flinging it away. Ogechukwu cringed every time it hit her. She’d rub her eyes, irritated by the kerosene fumes, looking longingly through the window at the dust her brothers raised while playing football, their shirts, which she would later be asked to wash, thrown carelessly aside along with their shoes. Her already irritated eyes filled with resentment and envy. There was no time for her to play; her time was for learning everything it took to please strange men who she was certain weren’t learning anything to please her if they were anything like her brothers.

“You won’t watch what I’m doing here, keep looking out the window. After now, they will say I didn’t teach you anything.”

Her mother lived in constant fear of they. Gripping the metal bars that guarded the windows, her face pressed against the warm metal, Ogechukwu was sure they had better things to do than worry about whether she could make pap.

Mama, who will say it? Who are those people who do not live here but keep dictating how I live in this house? Her mind screamed but her mouth refused to move and she swallowed her words like a ball of fufu dragged through soup and thrown down an open mouth. If she had an alarm that jolted her awake in her mother’s overpowering voice, she would never be late for anything.

Earlier that week, before Jide wanted moi moi, Ogechukwu had been to the market to buy ugu for soup. She’d just left work bone-tired, but Jide texted to say he wanted vegetable soup. She didn’t want to cut the leaves as it would take up more of her time and she had a report to send to her boss that night. She stepped up to a seller’s makeshift stall, a wooden table shaded by a sturdy tarpaulin roof, the same fabric as the Wife Material wrapped around her body. As she carefully selected the vegetable bunches she wanted from the pile, she tried to tell the seller to cut the leaves for her. Yet, when she opened her mouth, she heard a loud voice “Ehn! What happened to your hands? You want them to say that I didn’t train my only daughter well?” Her eyes darted around anxiously for her mother, her voice seemed to be coming from the mouths of multiple women in the crowd. Ogechukwu dropped her hands. “Pack it for me. I will cut it at home.”

She once broke a nail while hand washing Jide’s jeans. That same day, she used those aching hands to sweep and mop his entire house. Overnight, her Wife Material increased by a full yard.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. This was why, earlier that morning, she had cancelled movie day with her friends to go to the market to buy smoked fish for the moi moi she was making for Jide.

“Aren’t you coming again?” her friend had asked over the phone.

“If I finish on time, by God’s grace I’ll be there.”

Her friend sighed. “Just say you’re not coming,” she said as she hung up.

“By God’s grace” was Ogechukwu’s way of saying she didn’t know what time she would finish and didn’t want to commit. She had learned it from her mother. It was what she said whenever she was invited anywhere. It was also her mother’s way of saying that she could not control time, but she had to make the best of it nonetheless and get married before her youthfulness faded. Perhaps that’s why she had named her Ogechukwu—God’s time.

Ogechukwu’s mother had told her on countless occasions, her round brown face contorting in well-meaning concern, “I am teaching you how to cook and you should be grateful. In my time, no one taught me how to cook, I learnt on my own. To keep your man, you must learn to cook, and cook well or else he will be snatched by another woman.” She said snatched as though a man were a ballot box hijacked by thugs during an election, not a human being with a choice in the matter. Ogechukwu often wanted to ask her mother “So why did papa leave you for another woman even with all your cooking skills?” But the words clung desperately to the roof of her mouth.

“Baby, are the beans not blended yet?” her boyfriend called from the sitting room. She wanted to ask him if he was deaf and didn’t hear the noise of the blender but she raised her voice to reply “It won’t take much time!” They had met at a traditional wedding. Her friend was getting married to a Yoruba man and to show her support, Ogechukwu had bought her asoebi, made from the bride’s Wife Material, cut and sold by the bride to guests to be sewn into various styles and worn to the wedding. “God’s time is the best. He will do your own for you when he’s ready,” her friend had said the day she bought the fabric. Ogechukwu wanted to retort that she had amassed many more yards of Wife Material than her friend had, and that when she finally got married, she would still have a thousand more to keep her husband warm after selling asoebi; but she decided to keep her peace so nobody would say she was jealous. On the wedding day, she had arrived at the bride’s house early to help with the cooking and had left the others when the work had considerably reduced to go and get dressed. The wedding was supposed to begin by 3 p.m., but Nigerians operated on African time: if you wanted them to show up by 3 p.m., you had to write 12 p.m. on the invitation. Especially in Lagos, where the traffic turned a thirty-minute journey into a two-hour one. It was cause and effect. The guests came late because they knew if they arrived early, nothing would be ready, and the organizers didn’t prepare as early as they should because they knew the guests wouldn’t come on time.

The bride’s friends cooked at the back of the bungalow, while the front hosted the decorated canopies, chairs and tables for the guests. Some women stirred fried rice garnished with carrots, green pepper and peas, using a long wooden spoon to reach inside the gigantic aluminum pot that stood on a tripod over a fire of wood, paper and charcoal. Others fried large pieces of meat and fish, some made semo for the soup, some packed the already prepared jollof rice into huge coolers procured for the purpose. Ogechukwu wanted to take a picture of her outfit for potential suitors to admire. Where else to snag your own husband than at a wedding? She decided that she didn’t want to stand in front of the canopies or the food, so she walked down to some cars parked by the side of the narrow street and gave a boy playing with a tyre her phone to take the picture. She picked a gleaming red car and began posing in front of it, when the car door opened and a man stepped out of the vehicle wearing the uniform of Yoruba demons—a billowing Agbada.

“That will be 15,000.”

“Excuse me?” She turned to him.

“You changed your pose fifteen times.”

“Oh, good joke,” she chuckled in relief.

But his face turned deadpan and he said in a menacing tone,

“Who is joking with you? Give me my money jare, did I buy the car for you?”

She looked around, embarrassed, collected her phone from the boy, and gave him a twenty naira note for his help.

She turned to face the man again. “I apologize for using your car. I can delete the pictures if you like.”

His blinding smile broke out in full force again, confusing her. “I was just kidding!” he burst out laughing.

She turned away angrily intending to ignore him, but throughout the wedding he tormented her by popping up unexpectedly, persistently asking for her number until she gave in. A week after that, he called just as she was shuffling through the drawers in her bedroom, searching for a rubber band to tie her hair.

“Hello gorgeous,” he drawled.

“Who is this?”

“The man of your dreams. What’s all that banging? Are you cooking something in the kitchen?”

“No, I’m looking for something.” Ogechukwu was relieved that he had called. How would she do her own wedding if men collected her number and didn’t call?

“Oh, it sounds like you’re cooking. Bet your food tastes wonderful though.”

She’d laughed dryly, squeezing her patchwork absentmindedly. Two weeks later, she was cooking at his house. “Why not? My kitchen is bigger than yours,” he’d said, after she’d offered up a weak refusal to his initial request. Now, his friends came over regularly to fill their bellies.

“Our wife,” they hailed, as they gobbled down meal after meal. “Original Wife Material!” Ogechukwu felt proud of her nearly-complete patchwork, wondering how many more yards she needed to be considered worthy of the ultimate prize—marriage. One thousand yards? A million? Was there ever enough? This Wife Material business was beginning to feel like a lifelong audition. Who decided what was enough? The material was getting too heavy for her to drag around whenever she needed to display it.

One of Jide’s friends had brought his girlfriend over once. A lithe, polished lady, her weave flowing down to the middle of her back, her naked skin glowing like she had been injected with glitter. Ogechukwu didn’t have friends who had no Wife Material. She sometimes saw them in public—naked women with nothing to cover their bodies—and she pitied them. This one ate eba with a fork while others used their hands.

“I love eba,” she’d said in a soft, alluring voice “But it gets under my nails you see.”

Ogechukwu had looked at the long, red acrylic nails, topped with tiny glittering stones shaped into a heart. How does she wash clothes, she’d thought.

“Thank goodness someone invented a washing machine,” the girlfriend had said as if she’d heard Ogechukwu’s thought. “Damilare gets someone to come twice a week to do the cooking. Jide is so lucky he found you. I can’t even trust Dami’s boiled eggs.” She smiled sweetly at her boyfriend who’d bent to whisper in her ear, making her laugh out loud. The laughter irritated Ogechukwu, as if they were mocking her. She looked at the posh creature and imagined what her Wife Material would be, if she had any; it would be made from a rich blend of velvet and mulberry silk, draped effortlessly over the chair like a cape.

As Ogechukwu watched the beans swirl noisily in the blender, she felt as though she were one of them. Whirling recklessly against her will, without direction. Her right hand moved to her phone, her fingers dialed her mother’s number.

“Hallo!” The blast of her mother’s voice bowled her over. She bulldozed on. “Kedu? How are you? It’s been long you called. What’s that irritating sound there?”

“I am blending beans for moi moi.”

“With what?” her mother asked incredulously.

“With an electric blender,” she replied in a subdued voice. “Ogeeeee!” Her mother stressed her name in its short form.

“After all my efforts? What happened to the mortar and pestle! What if your future mother-in-law sees you now? She would think you’re lazy and capable of finishing her son’s money with these unnecessary machines!”

Ogechukwu pictured her mother’s rough, leathery hands, toughened from decades of labour, capable of carrying hot pots straight from the fire without flinching. She thought of the Wife Material wrapped around her mother’s neck and body—a coarse fabric woven from gristly ropes.

Through sudden tears, Ogechukwu stared at the blender. She turned it off, then forcefully ripped off her Wife Material, screamed through the blinding pain, and flung it angrily to the ground. She watched it fall into a heap, and for the first time, felt like a feather rising into the air. She stared at the crumpled fabric that had once been her pride, and recognized it for the load it had been. She grabbed her bag from the counter, strode triumphantly to the sitting room naked, and pushed past Jide, ignoring his perplexed shouts.

“What is it? What of the moi moi? I’m talking to you!”

His continuous enquiries and yells dulled into background noise as she pushed the house door open and became one with the night.

Maybe you remember Zora. I used to see her on St. Laurent selling jewellery and T-shirts and scraps of paper scribbled with art. In and out of bars and cafés, always alone, a storming shadow. Our eyes met once and I smiled. She stared, walked on.

So, when I saw her on Sunday, sitting in the garden of the American University campus in Cairo, I stopped. I’m not a student there but had taken to ducking into its gates to escape the clamour of the streets. Two children obscured her face, but I recognized the jet-black hair made grey with dirt, and the listless, arrogant slump of her body.

“I know you,” I said. “From Montreal.”

She squinted as the children ran back to their mother. Her voice was scratchy vinyl, a previous century, an emptied barrel of drink. She asked me when was I in Montreal last, was it cold, where did I live. Her arms and face twitched with delight that we frequented the same places and knew the same people.

As odd as she was, I was thrilled. I had been suspended in a waxy nothingness for weeks, a bug in amber that wasn’t setting. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses. She would be leaving for Luxor in two weeks, she said, and promised to call me when she returned. But as I started to walk away, I heard over my shoulder, “What are you doing tonight?”

Excited at the prospect of having something to do, somewhere to go, someone to talk to, I answered quickly. “Nothing.”

“Meet me at Café Riche at 8 o’clock. You know where it is?” “No.”

“You’ll find it.”

*

The winter sun in Cairo sets at six, and by eight, the downtown streets undulate to the hum of fluorescence and neon. I had read about Café Riche, its intellectuals and revolutionaries who leaned over its small round tables, smoking, arguing, living, waiting. Now, the cafe was a nest of backpacking tourists and women who had discovered they could sit alone, a respite from hands that touched and eyes that followed.

Zora arrived. Three heavy art books under one arm, a bag of sugar and a cigarette in her free hand. The books were rare, she said, as a pungent cloud settled around our heads. She said if I ever wanted more than the rationed allotment of sugar, I must come to her. She crushed her Cleopatra cigarette and told me she smoked two and a half packs a day. She rushed me through my beer so we could go to her place and have dinner.

We took a rickety elevator up to the roof of a ten-story building in Dokki. Directly across the Nile, the Sheraton’s neon dolphin flickered in the moonlit sky. The tiny apartment was a swamp of brushes and cigarettes, solvent jars, paint cans, ruts in the floor, cracks in the walls. Colour poured off drawings onto bread and garbage. At the far end, a pile of boots and an opened sofa bed confirmed that the place was indeed occupied.

In the other corner, she chewed a burning cigarette over a pot of boiling water and oil, and threw chopped vegetables into it like they were rocks. Every now and then a cardamom seed was added. From underneath a stack of old pita to the edge of the counter and up the wall, a long thin line of ants carried away the crumbs.

Bowls in hand, we sat on the mattress. She chewed loudly between breaths, exhaling words and cinnamon. The silence was noisy. She got up quickly to look for a brush she remembered needed cleaning. “Would you like to have an affair with me?”

The sound of my spoon falling into the bowl rang through the room. I hadn’t understood much that was happening, but I was understanding now. My involuntary laugh slithered to the floor then lay there, numb. I thought: this is her world, her game, learn the rules or go home. It was my intention to never go home.

“Do you?” My only concern was how nonchalant I could make myself sound.

“Yes. I think so. I think we should.”

“Why?”

“Because.” She found the brush. “Because I know you. You are from Montreal, we know people in common, you are alone in this city and, anyways, I think you are gay.” She sat down again. “I need an affair.”

She leaned her head back, rested it on an outstretched arm, hand finishing into a cigarette. As she talked, her eyes contracted. Sometimes she watched me, sometimes she stared at her paintings. I kept speaking Arabic, that was why I was in that country; I had goals after all. But her words were too thick, wrapping me in smelly blankets, at once hot and suffocating. Her accent was a muddy mixture of Arabic, Armenian, French, and English, none of which, she assured me, she spoke well.

It gave everything she said a scripted cadence.

“Do you like me?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to follow cues, trying to ignore cues. “Why not.”

“You say nothing with too many words. Do you find me interesting?”

“Ok. Yes.” I did my best to keep my smile, but it was unsteady. I asked her, “Do you find me interesting?”

“La. No. But you’re nice. Anyway, what is an interesting person?”

She told me about the lesbians in Cairo, that they were all married but had petting affairs. She told me that except for a few short petting affairs, she hadn’t had sex in seven years.

“Do you think I’m neurotic? Do you think I’m very materialistic? People say I scare them, that I’m too full of nervous energy. It’s really just sexual energy, you know.”

She had a plate of seeds and was cracking them between her teeth.

“You are very nice,” she said, spitting shells. “You are soft and mellow. And you are intelligent. I think also you are reserved. You do not like intimacy. There is a dark side to you.”

She paced the room and searched the floor around my legs. “Am I right in all this? I am very perceptive, aren’t I? People say I am very perceptive.”

Finding another brush, she taped a piece of paper to a wall and began painting, occasionally transferring her severe gaze my way. She kept talking, mostly admonishments. “Don’t say that. You are so Canadian. I don’t like it. The Arab in you has seen too many winters. I should take you to the desert.”

“You know why we should have an affair?” She threw down the brush. “To get rid of this stupid verbosity. If we go on and on like this, we will get close and that is not necessary and I do not want it. I want to build a wall, create a distance. If we have an affair and have sex and are intimate, then we can put a distance between us. I don’t want us to be dependent upon each other.”

She tore the paper off the wall. “Yalla, we go,” she said.

She took me to a cafe in the Souq al Ataba where we were the only women. Zora’s 43-year-old body was stuffed like straw into rags. She was the most outstanding and frightening of the whole lot of nighttime marauders. She wracked herself over the chair, dropped ashes onto her chest, hid her face behind the tangled mess around her head. I tried to not care, but kept catching the smirking expressions of the men around us. After a few cigarettes, she was anxious to go. I was a fish in her net as she dragged me to a taxi.

Back on her couch, in the light that did not warm or reveal, we drank more tea. It was late and I said I would go home. After half an hour, she finally conceded. In the elevator she threw her arms around me as I parsed the odour of her hair. Gasoline, tobacco, jasmine. Just before I got into the cab she mumbled something then spat on the ground.

*

The next day after class, I went straight to her apartment. It was a shock to see other people there, as if I had convinced myself she was a mirage and this building my own private tomb. The visitors were a priest and the wife of a German businessman, she would tell me later, there to buy her jewellery. They were elegant and well-spoken, smiling at me as if they knew something I didn’t. I could make no sense of it. In any case, I was in a bad mood. The city was still shocking, overpowering in its demanding chaos. Everything was catching me off guard, leaving me mercilessly vulnerable and trusting nothing, least of all my instincts. All day I had been disturbed by Zora. Was she a familiar haven or a distraction? Or worse? On her couch, on the verge of everything and nothing, I drank more tea. Neither of us spoke.

*

“We go. Yalla.”

I was growing fond of the now-familiar order to rally.

All week I followed her to art galleries and museums, met people she knew, and got a hint of what flourished in the quiet spaces between donkeys and dogs and the interminable honking of cars. Zora bought me the books I flipped through, the scarves I touched, the bracelets I tried on. I was hungry and she took me to dinner. I was curious and she explained what she knew. Everywhere we went, seas parted, pulling back in equal measures of disgust and respect. When she spoke, people strained for meaning, not believing that the language of their mothers flowed from this woman’s lips.

We went to Ramses train station and got her a ticket for Luxor. We hopped on and off buses, in and out of taxis, trying to decide what to do next.

“Would you like to see the pyramids?”

After two months in Egypt, they were still rumours to me. It was nighttime, dizzy and perfect. Fifteen minutes later, mouthing along to Om Kalsoum in a taxi, I let out an involuntary cry.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” she asked, reaching over. “Nothing.” I laughed. “I just saw a pyramid!”

We walked in the dark along the base of Cheops, its massive sides easing to an infinitesimal point with a strength and subtlety I could hardly grasp. We were leaning into a petrified tidal wave, following the trail of a cadaverous whisper. A guide, one of the hovering men who lived on the baksheesh of tourists, led us into a long, dark tunnel. “Secret, secret,” he repeated.

It got darker and the air thicker and the walls wetter. He and Zora moved quickly till all I could see were their green shadows.

“I have to get out of here,” I said.

I had no idea if they could hear me, and didn’t care. I backed out until it widened and I could turn around. No one would ever describe Egyptian air as fresh unless they were exiting the rank denseness of the pyramids.

“Cigarette?” Zora shook an extra one from her pack.

The guide now had a few of his friends in tow. If I looked slightly to the left or right of them, as one does in the emptiness of night, I could see more coming up from the paths. Everything scraped loudly in the darkness, like cars on dark snowy roads. Never a friendly sound, no matter the country, no matter the season. They encircled her, asked questions, gestured, jostled, came in closer. I heard my name. She passed around cigarettes.

“Let’s go,” she said to me.

“What?” I was not going to follow these men.

But we did, into the village and along a narrow dirt road lit only by a string of plastic lanterns. I turned back for one last look at the Sphynx, catching only a glimpse before the flood lights shut down and his comforting outline dissolved into the chilled indifferent sky.

“Do you hear dogs barking?” Zora asked. “They bit me once and they want to do it again. Never mind. We are here.” The men corralled us to a handful of tables outside a makeshift cafe. A partially-tuned radio played classical Egyptian music while they served mint tea for us and shisha for themselves. Zora had lived in this village years ago, I discovered, and the men remembered her fondly. They traded jokes and stories for hours, and every time our glasses drained, they drowned the leaves in more hot water. The smoke and flickering lights, the voices, the hot tea, my utter uselessness, all of it led to unconsciousness. When Zora woke me up, most of the men had gone. The backsheesh guide put us on a horse drawn caleche and took us to the main road, where we caught a taxi.

Her flat smelled of paint and smoke and I wanted to go home. She made us tea. I told her I wasn’t staying. She opened the bed. I sat on it. She lay down, entreated me. I let myself fall back, couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. She took my hand and teased me about things I was saying. She pulled me to her, wrapped her arms around my back. The day’s exhaust steamed through her teeth and she was on top of me.

“I want you I want you I want you I want you.”

I held my breath, didn’t dare move. The lightbulb on the ceiling burnt through my eyelids, casting silhouettes of ugly desperation as she moaned and chanted, chanted and moaned.

“Do you know how many years it’s been? How many women say no? I didn’t think I’d feel any emotion.”

We were fully dressed as she moved over me, anxious not to lose a second of my captivity. I forced myself to look at her, then over her shoulders and down her back. She moaned like a train exiting a tunnel, her tongue lolling as urgent groans rushed down it.

I felt affection, pity, disgust, and profound relief that our clothes were on. She reached into my pants but I grabbed her hand.

“No.”

“Why? You aren’t sexually aroused? You don’t find me attractive?”

“No.”

I wanted her to get it over with. To reach the point she’d begun moving toward from the moment I stepped into her shadow. She had courted me as if I were a scarab that would disappear if she moved too fast or too slow. She had paid for everything, had taken me everywhere, given me no reason to complain. It was time to complete the exchange.

While her shoes gripped the dirty mattress, I bit her shirt to keep from gagging. She came in a wild and ancient frenzy. Like a camel falling through the water, like a dog tearing its leg from a trap. She said thank you. At 4 a.m. she let me go, walking me down to a taxi.

The next day Zora went to Luxor. She will be gone three weeks, long enough for me to not answer the phone when she returns.