What The Universe Does

It seems right to start by describing Deirdre, since she was the first person I saw that morning and is often the first person I see in the mornings. Here is a short list of some of the finer aspects of Deirdre: She describes her dreams out loud to herself the moment she wakes, so that later, when lucidity has erased them, she might recall her dreams by recalling her words. She has a strange sympathy for lobsters, and turns away whenever we pass their miserable tank flanked by tables of dead fish at the farmers’ market. She does not believe in insults. She Deirdre believes that any flaw in a person great enough to garner an insult will be self-evident and therefore need not be said.

That Sunday, Deirdre appeared in the middle of my kitchen when I had only just gotten out of bed. When I saw her, I paused for a moment. It seemed like a tableau that described what we were like in the morning. Deirdre looked as though she’d been awake for hours, though it couldn’t have gotten light over an hour ago. She was in an outfit that was both practical and looked as though cartoon characters, possibly of the Disney variety, had picked it out for her. Her necklace, the beaten metal one in the shape of a dragonfly, rested on top of a shirt that had a rainbow of butterflies on it. I had woken up an hour ago, then spent an hour contemplating if having breakfast before noon was worth getting out of bed before noon. It didn’t seem to be, but I remembered that I had bought a whole new box of cereal the day before, and I experienced a brief minute of motivation.

“The book is gone,” Deirdre announced, as I migrated to the kitchen island at a glacial pace.

I blinked several times at her. There was something in my eye. I think it was sunlight.

“The book in Sage Garden” she clarified.

I blinked again, but the sun didn’t go. I hadn’t thought about the book in days, since we had gone to the Sage Garden and Deirdre had found a tree she thought was worthy of the fair folk’s attention. She’d explained that she had filled the notebook with poems, since she was thirteen, and now had no use for it except to let someone else read it. We’d gone to the Sage Garden in the local park (which was not truly named the Sage Garden, but the smell of sage was the first thing Deirdre had smelled upon entering, so she had called it, so the name stuck) and Deirdre had considered depositing the book in several potted plants, then the thicket of a rose bush, before deciding on the hollow of a tree.

I got a bowl and some cereal from the cupboard, then the milk from the fridge. I poured them both into the bowl. Around a mouthful of cereal, I said, “So you went there this morning?”

“Yes. The book was gone. I think the fairies must have taken it.”

I poured some more cereal and milk into my bowl, then prodded some cheerios with my spoon until they were milky enough to eat. “It could have been a squirrel. They’ll take anything. The pages might be good insulation for the nest. Do squirrels have nests, inside trees?”

Deirdre frowned. “I don’t think they’re called nests.”

I got out the bread and peanut butter and twisted the top off the peanut butter. I set them both in front of Deirdre, along with a plate. I put a knife in her hand. “Birds, too. Could have been a bird. The notebook has a silver design on the front right? It’s kind of sparkly. A magpie might have gone after it.”

Deirdre looked pleased for a moment at the idea of a bird being the one to take her notebook, as though she thought it might really read her words. She started spreading peanut butter. “I’m very sure it wasn’t a bird. Do you have jam?”

There was no point in trying to make Deirdre understand that it probably had less to do with magic and more to do with vagabond animals, because, as my mother had once pointed out, the difference between adults and children is that adults know what’s real and not. But it didn’t seem like Deirdre needed to be able to tell the difference. The world never attempted to break her from her childish mould. Magical-ish things coalesced around her. It was as though the universe had conspired to keep Deirdre in a constant state of belief.

I got Deirdre some jam from the cupboard. It was the black currant jam from the farmers’ market that Deirdre had wanted to get because it has a ribbon wrapped around it and she found the idea of black currant jam charming. I wasn’t sure it was charming with peanut butter, but she could find out.

“… and we could go have a look and find out,” Deirdre mused.

I pretended I’d been listening and nodded. When I turned Deirdre was looking at me curiously, her lips quirked. “Aren’t you going to go put shoes on?”

I’d missed a step, somewhere. “What?”

“You should put on shoes before we go out. There might be glass on the street.” Deirdre took a bite of her peanut butter and black currant jam sandwich, and the curious tilt of her lips intensified. “I think I would prefer the jam on its own. And the bread toasted.”

I put some toast in the toaster. “Out where?”

“To the Sage Garden,” Deirdre said, patiently.

I considered. My Sundays normally consisted of staying within my apartment, which was large enough to hold everything I owned without providing me with multiple opportunities to trip over boxes or piles of books, but small enough that, in any given room, whatever I needed in that room was probably in arm’s reach, so long as I stood in the centre of it. Or, in the case of my bedroom, everything was in arm’s reach of the bed. The only real problems occurred when I had to change position on the bed or pee. My apartment was stalked for Sunday. There were microwavable chips in the freezer and a cupboard full of crisps and I still hadn’t put on anything but pajama pants and a shirt. I had been prepared for Deirdre coming (she wasn’t hard to prepare for, because she had a key and could let herself in, and because she was Deirdre).

But I hadn’t been prepared to go out. I put another piece of bread in the toaster because it would take me longer than Deirdre preparing and eating one piece of toast with jam to get ready.

I went to my bedroom and changed into going-out pants and a going-out shirt. I put on shoes so I wouldn’t hurt my feet on any glass, then grabbed my wallet and keys.

Deirdre was waiting for me at the door. She waited while I opened it, stepped out, and locked it. Then she took my hand as we headed downstairs.

We hold hands. A lot. Nearly all the time, whenever we go out. It doesn’t mean anything. But here’s the thing: at some point, in western society, someone decided that holding hands did not just equal two hands in contact with one another, usually palm to palm, fingers either curled around the backs of hands or interlaced. At some point someone decided that holding hands was the equivalent of, “We are involved”. It is a sad function of society, to pair people because they’re different sexes or look cute together or happen to fall asleep on the couch together. Not that she and I were making any statement by holding hands. We could just have easily not held hands, and it certainly would have done something probably to improve both of our “single” situations by not seeming as though we were already taken, but it was never a concern for me, and she wasn’t the kind of person who was easily concerned about anything.

When we got to the Sage Garden, Deirdre commented that it didn’t seem much like a Sage Garden today, and more like an Oregano Garden. I wasn’t sure Oregano even grew there, but Deirdre had a better nose that I did. She led the way to the tree and reached up to feel around in the hollow. She was too short to see inside it, but on my tip toes I could see that the space where the book had been was now empty.

“What do you think?” Deirdre asked when I dropped back onto my heels.

I glanced at the watch on my wrist. “Let’s get coffee.”

In five minutes we were sitting in a café across the street from the park where Deirdre had given her book to the fairies. I’d ordered for Deirdre while she inspected the potted plants by the window, and then we took a seat in the sunlight. I had to adjust so Deirdre’s dragonfly necklace didn’t shine in my eye.

“What do you think the fairies are doing with it?” Deirdre asked.

I shrugged. “Reciting the poems to one another?” They could be tearing up the pages and lighting them on fire. They could be doing anything. It could have been an animal that got her book.

Deirdre bumped my knee with hers. I looked at her over the rim of my mug. There were pieces of looseleaf tea sticking to my lips. I never used a teabag if I could help it. “You don’t really believe it was them, do you?”

“I’ve never seen a fairy,” I said. “I can’t prove they exist. I can’t prove they don’t. I’m not invested in either side of it.”

“You’ve never seen the edge of the universe, but you haven’t travelled far enough to say that there isn’t one,” Deirdre said. “You should have as much faith in fairies as you do in the theory that the universe is infinite.”

“Right. But, see, it’s still a theory.”

She stared at the cinnamon bun as though she hadn’t just seen the server put it down in front of her. Then she began to unravel it, carefully. “Gravity is a theory.”

It was hard to argue with Deirdre. Because you could reduce most things to belief, even in science. And Deirdre didn’t understand what the difference was between a scientific theory, and a theory that just couldn’t be disproven. She didn’t understand why people were so determined to make the distinction between real and not real. “Do you mind that you won’t see your book again?”

Deirdre shook her head. “I left it there for a reason. Oh, are you done? Let me have a go, then.”

I handed over my finished tea, with the leaves scattered around the bottom of the mug. They looked like unhappy lumps of wet leaf to me, but Deirdre turned the cup and inspected them. I didn’t think she actually believed in tasseography. I think she appreciated the opportunity to look at something that might not exist, but that the universe would make real for her.

“This is strange,” she said, after some time.

I wished I had more tea. “What?”

“It says you’re going to fall in love,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“That’s what it says here. You’re going to fall in love. Soon. Or maybe you’re already in love.”

“You think a cup can tell me that? I don’t think that’s how it works.” I took my mug back from her. I gave it a cursory glance and saw that the tealeaves had settled into an almost recognizable shape.

I turned the mug as Deidre hummed a not-quite-agreeing noise. The leaves had coalesced into the unmistakable shape of a dragonfly.

Deirdre said, “Well, it’s just a theory.”

Art by Alex Konahin

Text by Lucie MacAulay 

Silver Apples Of The Moon

It was the same in nearly every county. The sun rose and filled the green rolling landscape with golden mist, instead of the silvery night kind, and cars rumbled down the path for an hour as they made their way into the city, and there was noise and bustle until rush hour ended, then I was all alone as my brothers played games.

My brothers only got away with playing the games because mother was too busy reading fortunes in the tiny parlour at the front of the house to tell them no. She told them off for tracking mud into the house after a particularly rainy or misty morning in the paddock, but the tealeaves always demanded her attention again, so my brothers and I were left to our devices for most of the daylight hours.

“I’m not playing,” I told them as they trudged through the tall grass to the paddock in their wellingtons. Only Joseph heard me, and he wiped his jam-sticky mouth on the back of his hand before he told me, “Suit yourself.”

They collected their colourful rocks and placed them at various places in the grass. They’d been painted many times, and varnished. I’d done it myself, so I knew that the paint wouldn’t come off and they wouldn’t have a small dot of colour to look at when they came back. Something to guide them out of the game when it ended. I’d only made six. One for each of them. I didn’t want to make a seventh.

“Want to manage it, Laurie?” Theodore, my oldest brother, asked. He always asked, as though, one day, I might change my mind. He was the one that usually woke me up, if Marcus didn’t get to it first. He was first dressed in the morning, at the stove, burning bacon until Elliot took over.

I shook my head. “What I want is for you to haul your asses inside and get started on lunch. I’m hungry.” Sometimes I was an asshole in the morning. Or in the afternoon. Most of the time, I didn’t care.

“You just ate,” Joseph said. He was halfway across the field, in front of the big apple blossom tree that was all leaves and no blossoms right now. If you squinted you saw the wilting petals that had fallen into the grass, but they were like slush, a dirty version of something that was once white and sparkling.

I tried not to whine, but my voice even grated on my nerves. “I’m hungry anyway.”

The sky flashed. Lightning drew a deep white crag through it. Rain fell, lightly at first, then it flung itself down. In a minute it would be a total downpour. Water was already swelling over the ground.

“God, Laurie,” Elliot said, loping through the grass to me. He held up his raincoat, which was yellow and patched with purple squares. He panted; he was not graceful at all on solid ground, and the dirt had become mud and he was sinking into it. Each footstep he took was several seconds of squelching and tugging. “Take this. Put it on. Pull up the hood. Come on.”

“You should go inside,” Marcus said. Henry has a hand over his brow and nodded, but he was already thinking about the game, I could tell. They were all thinking about the game. It was like trying to hold their attention while somebody whispered in their ear over their shoulder. It was nearly impossible. This close to starting it, they could probably already smell the warm loam and moss of the woods, the rot of the logs. Whatever place it was that hung over us today. Wherever they were going to find their silver apples.

“How long will you be gone?” I asked. They would all come back at different times; that was the point. But I would stay out here until at least two of my brothers reappeared from the game.

“Good lord,” Theodore said. “Not long, Laurie. In time to make you lunch.”

I hoped Elliot would be back first. He was the fastest cooker, the one guaranteed to have us fed and out of the kitchen and into the back room where we wouldn’t disturb mother and her clent in the parlour before we’d all shed our wellies and coats and gloves.

The trees were slicked with rain. The water was up to my ankles, but it would have to rise much higher to actually wet my feet. My brothers all took their positions at their rocks.

This was part of what terrified me. I’d yelled at them once for it. “What if something- a bird or something, just comes along and picks up your rock? Where will you be? How will you find your way back?”

“Calm down,” Marcus had said, while Elliot shoved a jammie dodger in my face. It was enough to keep me from talking while Theodore patted my shoulder, then seemed to think better.

“Because,” Theodore said. “If you was stood up there, you’d just have to have good aim. We can see the rooftop of the house from the woods. We just have to fall nearest enough to it. I could show you some time, Laurie. If you came up with me.”

I had shaken my head. They would never get me up there. They could race to find an orchard-full of silver apples before I ever went up there.

Today they were back just after lunchtime. It was dangerously close to tea time, when mother had her most important and- this was important – wealthiest clients. We could absolutely not be caught in the house at teatime. It meant either condemning ourselves to an hour of total silence, without access to the washroom or the kitchen, or being banished to the outdoors again. It was best to get lunch before her clients arrived. At least then, when one of us or all of us had a bursting bladder (that was usually Joseph or Henry) we would have full stomachs.

Kieran, who is usually quite soft-spoken, though he does have outbursts at the strangest times, once protested that this was not fair. He’d nearly pissed his pants the day before, in front of me. And Theodore walloped him on the back of the head to make sure he didn’t. Mother pointed out that we were free to go outside, for as long as we liked, so long as we were back before she was inspired to call the police. She’s funny like that.

Henry won today. He came strolling from between the trees, picked up his rock (Easter egg purple) and came toward me. In the hand not holding the rock, there was a silver apple. It looked like a cheap piece of plastic, like a Christmas ornament from a dollar store.

“They all get like that here,” Marcus had said the first time I looked at it. I’d thrown it against the side of the house to see if it would shatter like a real apple, but it bounced off like a fake one.

Henry handed me the apple. I handed him his jacket. The rain hadn’t stopped, but it was letting up some. We were both soaked now. “Do you think you’ll join us tomorrow, Laurie?”

“I won’t.”

“What’s this?” Elliot came over, and this time he did slip in the mud. When he came up, his hand was a mess of mud and leaves. He wiped it on Henry’s coat. “You’d like it up there, Laurie. Come on.”

Henry pulled my hat down so the rain didn’t drip into my eyes. “Stop badgering Laurie.”

Theodore arrived next. Then Kieran. And Joseph was the last. I held up Henry’s silver apple to show them that he’d won, and Theodore glanced at his watch before ushering us back to the house. We had twenty minutes to divest ourselves of our jackets and boots, use the bathroom, and grab the makings for sandwiches. Mother had already taken the scones out and they were cooling on the stove. Their smell made us linger in the kitchen until mother swatted at us with a dishtowel. Then we took refuge in the back room for an hour, curling in our grandmothers’ quilts while the rain tapped on the windows. It made just enough noise that Theodore could lean over and whisper, “Where’d you put the apple?”

“The kitchen,” I said. I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether or not it got thrown away. Neither were my brothers. It was the game to them, the race. The woods above our house. I was scared for the day they realized they wanted to play the game elsewhere, and one by one, would leave. “How is it much better in the air than on the ground?” I whispered, cupping my elbows with my palms and leaning my chin on the swell of his arm.

“How is it much better on the ground than up there?” he asked.

I shook my head because I couldn’t answer.

The next day we had a visitor. Visitors are few and far between, and mother doesn’t take to them appearing out of nowhere like this one had. Theodore and Marcus spoke to him on the doorstep rather than let him inside. We were more afraid of disturbing mother than of appearing ill-mannered.

But the stranger didn’t look unhappy to be on the doorstep. He looked unhappy for some other reason, a reason that creased his face and made him look as old as Theodore, though he couldn’t have been older the Kieran. He was wearing a yellow waistcoat, and he clearly wasn’t prepared for the perpetually rainy weather. His oxfords were probably once black, but you couldn’t tell because they were encased in bricks of mud.

“I just noticed you’ve got one of those forests,” the young man said. “I don’t mean to cause any trouble, but I would be chuffed if you’d let me have a go at it.”

He had a pleasant accent, the kind that mother’s clients from London, from the well-off part of London, possessed. I wondered what could have brought him here, to the beautiful country and the soulless forest above it, when Theodore said, “It wouldn’t be any trouble. As long as we don’t disturb our mother.”

“You’ll have to come in the back door too,” Marcus said.

“If that’s alright,” the stranger said. “I’d love to.”

I liked the way he talked. With genuine politeness. Not like he’d been raised with manners, like my brothers sometimes acted, but like he’d grown into them. Had realized that the world would be a nicer place if more people had them, and elected to take them up all of his own.

When we came in the back door, Henry let out a scream like a cat in heat. Joseph was holding an ice cold bottle of water against his naked back. He pulled back as Henry twisted his spine and declared, “Rotten bastard!”

Then they all spotted the young man and forgot themselves and shoved aside brocade cushions and quilts and considered turning up the heat, though they ultimately decided against it, since mother would probably feel it in the diner. Theodore introduced us. “That’s Joseph, Kieran. That’s our sister Laurel.”

It was the late hours of the morning, but we’d done laundry (it was hanging, not drying, outside) so we hadn’t even gotten on our wellies yet. The stranger looked at the silver apple from the day before that I’d left on top of the piano (no one played the piano, because it was so out of tune that middle C sounded like Henry’s scream). He did not have a calculating look, but more a curious one. He sat on the uncomfortable couch as though he’d been fused to it. “Is that from the forest?”

“Yes,” Theodore said, and tapped the silver apple. “Looks better up there, I have to say. Have you seen one before?”

The young man shrugged. He has perfect posture, so perfect there wasn’t a wrinkle in his yellow waistcoat. “I’ve seen silver apples and gold apples. I saw a few cornucopias of fruit. In some places its plums. Or a salmon.”

“A Salmon,” Elliot hooted, as though the stranger had told him he’d once found a gnome in the forest.

“Just apples here,” Marcus said. Then, “You’ll have to wear Henry’s second boots. I reckon they’ll fit you.”

The idea that the stranger would be up there, playing with my brothers, searching for a silver apple, filled me with inexplicable horror. I watched him don the wellies and wondered if he would be the one to come back first, or if he wouldn’t know where to look, how to navigate the forest. I thought of the fact that we only had six rocks.

“How will you find your way back?” I asked, as we trudged toward the paddock.

“I’ll just have to be careful and keep an eye on the roof,” he said.

“It’s got a weathervane shaped like a sheepdog,” I told him. “Just in case you can’t remember what it looks like.”

“That sounds brilliant. Thanks.” He paused and seemed to consider another question. “Are you coming up too? Or is it just your brothers?”

“Just my brothers,” I said, trying not to sound pitiful. But I did. And he heard it.

“You don’t like the game?” he asked. “Loads of girls in the city play it. You look like you’d love it. Your brother’s aren’t all right with their little sister going up there?”

I was about to tell him that it had nothing to do with my brothers, but that wasn’t quite the truth. Because they loved the forest and the game and everything it had to offer. They loved the silver apples, even when they became nothing more than plastic Christmas tree ornaments on the way back down. They loved the game so much that sometimes their eyes glassed over as though they weren’t behind them anymore.

“I just don’t need to play it,” I said.

The stranger pulled his right wellington out of the mud. It came away with a great sucking sound and so much mud it was a wonder he hadn’t just pulled his foot from the boot. He sighed, not condescending or pitying, just understanding. He reminded me a little of Theodore, then he said, “You know, I think you’d be great at this game. Maybe you’d like to play in the city?”

I thought of the silver apple on top of the piano. “Depends. I want a bigger prize than apples.”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Demand

Ordinarily, the stretch of road between British Columbia and Venice in California is just a dusty waiting period. There is movement, not all of it forward. Some of it was not in a direction, on a tilting of an axis, when William drove a little too close to a ditch and the car tipped into it. He cussed at gravity and took my phone to call a tow truck, then cussed some more and announced that they wouldn’t be here for a couple of hours.

I jokingly suggested we visit the pool, or the casino, and gestured at the dead, desert-like landscape. It was so calm and empty, I half-expected tumbleweed to blow across the road in front of the car. William didn’t laugh; I wasn’t good at making jokes, and while he usually at least laughed, just to acknowledge that I’d make one, not to encourage me or say that it was good, he was not good at taking jokes when he was bound to miss his favourite television show. He stared sullenly over the length of the BMW’s front, then got out, slamming the door, and kicked at the dirt. Exept the dirt was dust, so it rose about his knees and blew away. William has a talent for looking like a petulant child, still, and at 20 he could look like a petulant toddler.

I did not have the talent to express myself when I was upset. I was not versed in the language of unhappiness or anger. I knew it involved the scrunching of eyebrows, the drawing back of lips from teeth, gutteral noises from the back of one’s throat, but I could perform none of these without an impression or formality or discomfort that ruined the effect. I didn’t even twiddle my fingers. I made myself smaller, without occupying less space. I blinked rapidly. But my mouth, when I looked at my reflection in the side-mirror, didn’t even turn down at the corners. I didn’t look upset to myself, and if my throat didn’t feel constricted, because I hated to be stuck in the middle of nowhere when it was so hot and home was only two hours away (now four or five hours away), I wouldn’t even know that I was upset.

We’d been waiting an hour, and together William and I had finished five of the eight sodas from the backseat (now so warm they were beginning to make my stomach feel queasy), when the girl knocked on my window.

It was the least convenient way by which she could have presented herself. Mainly because I was startled into throwing my soda at William. I groaned because I didn’t want to clean up the car, which was sugary and sticky and now smelled like hot orange crush, and William cussed because one of his seven identical white t-shirts now had an identifying orange stain spreading across it.

The girl waited outside the door, bent so she could look through the window without shading her eyes. She had hair shorn at the shoulders, that stuck to her lips when the hot wind blew it across her face. She had sun burnt shoulders, and several freckles, and pleasantly tanned skin that made me aware of how pale I was. Her eyes were lined with so much eyeliner that they looked as though she’d actually smeared ashes in a streak across them both. When she blinked the mascara on her eyelashes quivered like dirt.

I knew she was a prostitute, in that judgmental way that you know someone is a cheerleader or a math geek or just an idiot. She wasn’t dressed in anything more revealing that what you’d see on a fifteen-year-old catholic girl in Los Angeles. And it wasn’t her expression, which wasn’t what I expected from a prostitute- too calm and wise and wary. Not condemned or pitiful. She didn’t even have the air of seductiveness that I imagined from a prostitute- though I’d also imagined prostitutes as either high-heel wearing fishnet stocking with red lips, or fur-stole wearing women with silk slips and the curly hair from a black and white movie. But I knew she was a prostitute before I rolled down the window.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m sort of stranded. Could I catch a ride with you?”

William was looking at her intensely. I was betting that he could also sense she was a prostitute. I knew my little brother. I knew he frequented brothels, or just clubs where someone would go to the backroom with him for the same price as some cocaine. I didn’t want to protect either this girl from my brother, or William from this girl. Something about her seemed unfazeable; William seemed more likely to get hurt by any interaction. Maybe this would be a lesson in rehabilitation for him.

“We’re stranded too,” William said. His voice was several degrees deeper than it usually was. “Tow truck won’t come for another hour or two. But we can drop you off somewhere after that.”

I had to interject. It was my car, after all. “As long as it’s on the way to Venice.”

William frowned. “Don’t be a bitch, Maggie. We can take her wherever she’s going.”

I had been driving for two days already, while William slept or listened to music or played angry birds in the passenger seat. I wasn’t inclined to go anywhere but home and a hot shower.

“I’m going to Venice,” said the girl.

William, smoothly, said, “So are we. We can take you all the way.”

I didn’t miss the innuendo in his voice. I doubted the girl did either. She didn’t smile, just tipped her head and waited for my decision. I was glad that at least she, if not William, recognized that I was calling the shots in this situation.

She climbed into the back seat, and William offered her a soda. She drank the warm soda and didn’t gag, and didn’t make any attempt to keep William from looking up her skirt. I avoided her eyes in the rear-view mirror. I touched the car keys and ran my fingers over the ridges. I picked my shirt away from my chest and blew out long breaths. William twisted in his seat to talk to the girl.

“My name’s William. You can call me Will. Unless you want to call me something else.”

“Like what?” she said. Her voice didn’t go up at the ends when she asked a question. Only the cocking of her head said that she’d asked a question instead of made a statement.

William smiled like a viper. “Well. Most of the girls I meet call me ‘God’. Pretty enthusiastically.”

I wanted to punch him in the mouth. I may not excel in expressing my anger, but in my mind I was as emotive as any girl, and William’s teeth were falling out of his mouth.

“I’m not sure you could afford me,” the girl said. I knew she meant it. She wasn’t making a joke. But here’s the thing: William and I are from a well-off family. We live in an apartment with our parents (who are mostly absent, because the thing about having money is that those with it tend to travel other places with it), and at the time neither of us had a job, yet we had hundreds of dollars of spending money over a few weeks. William’s eyes brightened.

“I’m sure I could arrange something,” he said.

“You don’t approve?” The girl was talking to me, but I didn’t notice because I’d been busy not watching her cock her head in the mirror.

I spoke to the mirror instead of her. “It’s not my business what you do with your body.”

“Damn right,” William said. Condescension dripped in his voice. “Prostitutes are people too.”

The girl didn’t say anything. Nor did I. My brother was the pot, the girl was the kettle, but the kettle had also brought it upon herself and was probably used to horny pots throwing themselves at her. I was as silent as I could be, and occupied my seat while still shrinking into it. When the tow truck arrived, the man driving it gave the prostitute a once-over before pulling the BMW out of the ditch and explaining to me- only me, because I had the wallet- just how much it would cost to not be in a ditch. Then, though I didn’t want to, I got back in the car with William and the prostitute and drove through California’s backwater towns, past the redwood forests and the valley, to Venice.

By the time we got the neighbourhood where our expensive apartment was, the girl had told us that she had nowhere to stay, and requested that we let her stay with us. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. She had no luggage. Not even a knapsack or a purse. She had nothing in her pockets. Of course she had nowhere to go. But I recalled the time William had brought home a stray bird with a broken wing. We didn’t know how to nurse it, and the bird crapped on our hands and the rug, tipped over one of Mom’s vases, and chased our dog under the bed. William had found it delightful and hilarious. Mom and I had a silent conversation that went something like this: Why did we do this?

It will never happen again. No more birds in the house.

Do you want to get Rudy out from under the bed? He’s whimpering again.

I doubted she would crap on the rug or chase Rudy under the bed. Actually, she couldn’t chase Rudy, because he was dead. But there were several other things she could do.

“I’m not sure…” I said, which I hoped William would translate to: I’m not sure I can handle this, psychologically.

He didn’t. Or maybe he did, but his dick didn’t care. It did more of his thinking than his brain, and overruled any sense of sibling loyalty. “You totally can. You don’t even have to pay us. I mean, if you want to do me a favour…”

“I don’t generally offer favours,” the prostitute said.

“And we don’t generally take in strays. But people change their minds.”

“I need a big reason to change my mind.”

William laughed. “I’ve got a big reason, don’t worry.”

The conversation was becoming circular. After several days it was cyclical as the seasons, and too comfortable to abandon. If there was a lull in the conversation, it was filled and smoothed over with jeers about one another’s unrealistic dreams.

This was possible because she did stay with us. She stayed in Mom and Dad’s room, in the bed they’d vacated while they went to Peru or Petra or Pennsylvania (something with a ‘P’). She did not crap on the rug.

She spoke rarely other than those interactions with my brother. And never about herself. It wasn’t reticence, like me. It was as though nothing had happened in her life before she’d met us in the desert of California. As though she had emerged from the dust, more troublesome and conspicuous than tumbleweed.

She never mentioned my brother’s hypocrisy. It was clear he had no respect for her profession (which she didn’t actually seem to partake in, while she stayed with us). Everyday there were several pot-kettle interactions. He was several shades of black by the afternoon, and at night I wondered how she hadn’t come to punch him in the face.

“Why don’t you tell him that he has no right to say that?” I asked her in one of my more talkative moods. That was, perhaps, one of the only things I had in common with her. That I could go days without speaking and be more comfortable than the “no, thanks” I said when they asked if I wanted whipped cream at Starbucks. “He can’t criticize you. He’s the… demand to your supply.”

“It’s a condition of your upbringing,” she said.

I opened my mouth. All that came out was air. Words trotted onto my tongue, then retreated. I closed my mouth.

She stayed for several more weeks. I was too kind to turn her out. But my philanthropy had its limits. When she’d first stayed with us, she had had a little money and she’d smelled like an alleyway, or a sewer, or a sewer in an alleyway; I refused to let her borrow my clothing.

I didn’t say anything about her short skirts or the stilettos she wore when she went out. She said nothing about the books that piled around my room, or the table, when I worked at it. I’d been writing reports and, sometimes, speeches, for companies that needed formal presentations for… presentations. It isn’t a job that has a title, really. But it was providing a sum of money that my parents hadn’t given me, and I was grateful for that. I sometimes felt like it sucked away at pieces of my soul, when all I really wanted to do was write a book. Authors said you needed to put in the time to write a book, and that some of them wrote at the end of twelve-hour work shifts. I wrote enough to keep me afloat when my parents forgot to transfer money into my bank account, and lent my voice to companies whose voices were too muddled or informal to preach about their own glory.

One day the prostitute sat with a cup of coffee across from me at the table and watched me scribble. Today I was writing something about the combined efforts of a private hydro-electric power company’s workers. About the minimum-wage workers being the foundation, and the CEO being the crux, and more lies than I could count.

“You don’t really mean that,” the prostitute said.

I started. I didn’t thinks he’d been reading my writing upside down. When I looked up, her eyes weren’t on my paper.

“I don’t mean what?”

“What you’re writing?”

I became smaller, and not. “It’s just a job.”

The prostitute sipped her coffee. “Your brother William is not the only pot in this house.”

I wasn’t one who took insults and flung them back with several more ounces of venom. I couldn’t. I could only become smaller and feel my cheeks flush. She didn’t look judgmental at all, which somehow made it worse. “I don’t sell my body.”

“You sell your voice. You sell what you need to- or want to sell. I don’t blame you for your hypocrisy. William suffers the same condition. Perhaps it is a condition of your heritage. Are your parents hypocrites?”

My mouth fell open. The prostitute sipped more coffee. She made better coffee than anyone I knew, and drank more of it than I ever knew, but seemed no more awake for it. “Maggie. Magdeleine. You’re named after a whore in the bible.”

I’d always known that. But some people were named after conquerors or shared names with rapists. It didn’t sound like such a distant relationship when she said it. She said, “I’m going to leave tomorrow morning.”

“Just… just like that?”

She set her coffee down. There was a scarlet lipstick stain on the rim of the mug. “Just like that. I can’t avoid work forever. But consider what I’ve said. Pot,” she pointed at me, “Kettle,” she pointed at herself. “Black as coal.”

The prostitute rose from the table, didn’t look at the mess that was my life and the only commitment I could make at the moment, despite hating it, and carried her mug to the dishwasher.

In the morning, William filled the apartment with his sullenness when he discovered the prostitute had gone without providing her services to him. He had the money, he complained. We’d been kind. I was too judgmental; she’d left because of me. I did not mention that, between the two of us, he had had more interaction with her than I ever had. I also suspected that, maybe, that was part of what the prostitute had been talking about.

I never saw her around Venice. I did see other prostitutes, none of them as world-weary as the one we’d picked up in the middle of the desert. I didn’t look away from them. I didn’t know if that was a step in the right direction, but it felt better than turning away, as though they were a horrible event I wanted to forget.

I didn’t quit my job. I wrote papers and prostituted my voice, and my voice was worn away and carved into something sharper and smoother and more me than anything else in my life. I wrote and slept and ate and spent my parents’ money. Write. Eat. Sleep. Supply. Supply. Finally, I wrote.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay