Cortez

Nighttime in the desert is different from nighttime anywhere else. Darkness stretches form horizon to horizon as though it’s been pasted there. Any light beneath it is somewhat miraculous. If there weren’t other miracles in the desert, ones more influential than luminosity, people might make speculations about light in the desert. But the real miracles were loitering around an enormous box truck, looking up at the starts, or ahead at the mountains, or down at the thin layer of dust that the wind sometimes kicked up. The stars were interesting because they had been shifting for the last hour- shifting was not the right word. Showering sounded better, but it was not right either. They looked like raindrops running into each other on a pane of glass.

The mountains were interesting because they were high, alpine creations and somehow still radio waves and waves of other sorts strained over their peaks. They were formidable and unmovable and no match for the tiny antenna on the tiny radio they’d taken from the oldest girl’s mother’s kitchen.

The dust was not as interesting, but it wasn’t the dust that was being looked at. The girl with her eyes on the dust was truly looking at a narrative in her own mind, in which she climbed into the box truck and drew gratuitously large and circuitous lines all over the desert floor with its wheels, and then turned those wheels toward the mountains and together she and the truck gallivanted into the sunset, away. The narrative stopped there, because she has no use for anything that came after that. Away was the best outcome in this scenario, so away was the happy ending.

The box truck had once been more box truck than it was now. It had been decked out with parts of other cars that the girls had owned, fixed, scrapped, or just come across. Only one or two pieces had been liberated illegally for the express purpose of making the box truck look a little less like a box truck. This was Camila’s fault. The box truck currently resided on the flattest piece of desert Camila could find, surrounded by scrub, far from town. It was faded, though Camila would have liked to put another coat of paint on it. It was high off the ground, though Camila would have preferred there was only an inch of breath between it and the sand. The seats were not leather, though Camila would have preferred to burn herself sitting in them on a hot day.

The truck had a single fracture in the windshield, which was weathering it valiantly. A pair of miniature boxing gloves were strung up on the rearview mirror. The truck had license plates from California, but it had spent so much time in Colorado that no one remembered that it’s native state was not Colorado.

The radio was not broken, but the entire box truck was having issues constantly. It had a tempestuous relationship with the heat, with the sand, with its own rusting insides, and with its age, so the radio played intermittently and moodily. The radio that played was in the cargo area. It almost disappeared in the dark, because it was made of a dark red that matched the countertop it had been taken from. It played a radio station from town, one that was owned by Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend. It broadcasted rock and roll. It broadcasted Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend’s voice. It broadcasted songs that made Camila think that if the radio had muscles, they would all be straining at once to push these songs out.

The radio had been taken from Sofia’s mother’s kitchen, but the truck was Camila’s. Though this story belongs to every one of the Cortez sisters, it belongs more to Camila than either of the other two. Camila was not in love with the radio station, but it was her heart powering the truck, allowing the AM radio waves in. She and the box truck shared the same calculating expression. If someone were to slash one of the slightly deflated tires of the box truck, Camila would bleed.

“Here’s another one to soothe you into that lazy summer night feel,” the DJ said. “This song is made for the PM. No daylight songs now.”

Piper tilted her head toward the radio, as she always did when the DJ spoke, like an attentive animal hearing the call of its own. Piper was selectively attentive. She was the youngest of the Cortez sisters, and her name was not actually Cortez. But she did not care for her name. She cared for being left alone when she wanted to be alone, and approached and kept around when she wanted to hover. She had hair pulled strictly away from her face, and eyes downcast from the weight of her thinking brain behind them. The lantern in the bed of the box truck was behind her, which meant her freckles disappeared. She was wearing a thin blouse, which meant she was thinking hard; when so much of her thought was devoted to something specific, there was too little to inform her that she was cold. There were several beaded and tasseled bracelets around her right wrist, because she wrote and fiddled with her left hand.

In the daytime, she did not lean against the box truck and think. In the day, she learned how to drive in her father’s Dodge truck, and read and pondered the many places outside Colorado. She looked at pictures of places that bore no resemblance to the high alpine desert. This curiosity worried her mother and her father and her grandmother. It worried her a little. Only because she feared she might never see those places herself. She felt a thrill of danger in her father’s truck each time she put her hands on the wheel. She believed, superstitiously, that the truck might lead her where she was meant to go.

Because Piper believed this: she was meant to go elsewhere. Beyond Oro Vada. Outisde Colorado.

Piper flinched when Camila nudged her shoulder. She turned so Camila’s knee was pressed against her ear instead. She could see Camila’s raised eyebrow in her mind if not with her eyes.

Camila did not notice the flinch. No one noticed the flinching anymore. “Did you hear that?” she asked, knowing Piper had not. Piper’s hearing was as selective as her attention. “Your non-relative just said the station covers the entire desert. I don’t think he knows how large the desert actually is.”

Sofia raised both her brows, because she shared Camila’s skepticism. There was a lot of desert to cover, and the station was too small and insignificant to go much farther from Oro Vada than the box truck.

Camila sat up in the bed of the truck. Her feet dangled over the edges of the bed, the bottoms the colour of the desert. Because Sofia was in the truck with her, she got a rib full of knee. Together they jostled, together they upset one of the snake eggs that sat on top of a magazine and had never hatched. They watched it roll on the floor of the bed, as if escaping. Disaster flicked its eyes their way, briefly. Sofia reached for the egg and returned it to the magazine pile.

“It won’t hatch anyway,” Camila said.

“But we don’t want it to just break open on the bed,” Sofia said. “It’s still got that new car smell.”

It had no such smell. This was a joke as the expense of all three Cortez sisters, who had rehabilitated the car to the best of their abilities after it had been brutally neglected. Before it belonged to Camila Cortez, it belonged to Nicolas Cortez, Camila’s cousin, who vanished to San Francisco and returned with a box truck that made his parents proud and a wife that did not. The truck stuck around longer than the wife, and when Nicolas swore never to bring home another woman, or himself, he abandoned the truck on the Cortez’s land. The truck was used briefly to carry feed between ranches, and to transport relatives from carpentry jobs to paint jobs to landscaping jobs to bars. When the truck grew weary and threw a tantrum, the Cortez’s developed suddenly great skill at walking. The truck was left to stew in its bitter feelings. Then the rain came and it stewed in the rain. Then the animals and the wind came and seeds stewed in it, and animals sewed in the crops that rose out of it. Sedges climbed over the hood and roof and absorbed noisy frogs and attracted sand hill cranes. When the trout moved in, delivered by storms or monsoon rain or their own desperation, coyotes followed. The cranes hardly stood a chance. The sounds of cranes being devoured messily in the middle of the night was enough to drive the Cortez’s to action.

Camila had volunteered her services, mostly because she felt that denuding the truck of sedges and swamp timothy would be like pulling the wrapping off a gift. She worked steadily and cruelly to evict the animals. The plants took less notice of her efforts, because she was more gentle and slow evicting sedge. She found plant life more charming than bloody-muzzled coyotes. The truck was slow to trust her, but eventually even it seemed to forget the trauma. The only reminder was the snake egg that had never hatched, found under the passenger’s seat when she was chasing a leopard frog toward the door. The egg was heavy enough to contain fetal snake, but still enough that it was unlikely the fetal snake was destined to emerge. It had stayed in a rolled up sock in the glove compartment for a while, and now it sat on top of a stack of magazines where Sofia occasionally glanced at it and suggested they paint it and make an ornament of it.

The radio crooned something new and dubious. The Cortez sisters held their breaths briefly to acknowledge this, and to pay it some attention. They were all enamored with pirate radio, which they collectively saw as an embodiment of American youth and its hunger for terrible music, revolution, and jail time. Only one of these things did not appeal to them, and as Camila has once pointed out, they would none of them go to jail for listening to pirate radio. Piper knew firsthand that the broadcasts were pre-taped, and that the DJ used a false name over the radio. Revolution was good; avoiding fine while revolutionizing was best.

“Maybe he’ll get caught this summer,” Sofia said. She did not want to see any relative, or friend, or friend of a relative of Piper’s go to jail, but she was curious to see what would happen, and she had a healthy amount of concern about the Federal Communications Commission that meant she assumed that it was inevitable.

“He won’t,” Camila answered, because when a question was open to any of the Cortez sisters, it was Camila that answered first. Camila seemed often as rapt in her own imagination as Piper, but Sofia thought some of that might be a lie. She was almost always ready to respond.

Art by Gabriele Crow

Text by Lucie MacAulay

A Frog Among Princes

I was never interested in kissing, and I had considered it a personal failure. Everyone seemed to want to kiss. Everyone seemed driven by a desire for physical intimacy. I desired something else, though I could not articulate it. All I could articulate was that I would not be fulfilled by a kiss. Depending on how you say it, people can take that different ways. They rarely took it the way I meant it, and the follow-up questions were predictable and easy to answer.

The ball was held late summer. I was born, unfortunately, during a heat wave, and therefore every subsequent birthday had to be celebrated during or on the edge of another heat wave. It was hard to evoke jubilation in a crowd of people that were melting. I immediately hated the day when I felt the uncomfortable trickle of sweat down my spine. Gogu was the only one to enjoy the heat.

I had mastered the art of entering my birthday party as inconspicuously as any guest. I wove through a crowd of Fiskers and Porches and Mustangs first. I was sure my parents didn’t know anyone who drove a Honda civic. The cars huddled together clannishly, like their owners. I could make out faces in the lantern-light. The garden was strewn with lanterns, and structures for the vine flowers to climb. Everything was wreathed with golden light and smelled like a flower shop had thrown up. Gogu had once told me that there was a way to assure roses would grow steadily and unhesitatingly in someone’s garden, and that was if they grew atop a body. It sounded very fairy tale to me at the time.

“How many people do you think have lived on this land?” Gogu had said to me. “Why do you think it’s so unlikely that one of them also died here? Beside, your garden is big enough for a morgue-full of people to have died and been buried.”

Just another way in which the upper class were privileged, though if someone had had the thought of planting roses in a warzone, I suppose those roses would outdo ours easily.

I let someone touch me on the elbow. This was normally forbidden, but this was not a normal night. I had to resign myself to others’ touch. Gogu was probably snickering from a potted plant somewhere, his ego inflating exponentially. But Gogu didn’t count as other; I didn’t think he had such a right to be as smug as he was that he was an exception to the rule.

“Lily!” Someone shouted. I couldn’t put a face to the voice, but someone saluted with three fingers, the gesture of the varsity swim team. I saluted and carried on.

He was here, and not too far away. I had to remind myself that I had submitted to this party more for Evan than because it appeased something nascent and empty in my parents. He looked very much like one of the Porsches in the front, which is to say shiny and untouchable and like he had nothing to do with me.

Gogu appeared on a day with rain. He appeared on a day with brilliant orange sun. I had just walked through my mother’s plot of garden, where nothing thrived beneath her un-green thumb, to the gardener’s herb garden. I preferred it to my mother’s flowers. The smells were richer, the plants more practical, and I did not have to hear about their difficulties or how much or little they needed to be watered.

I’d seen a frog leaping across the path and had decided to hurry it along, incase it was trying to make it across the entire garden, or in case someone else came along the same path and was not looking down for stray animals. The frog looked as unappealing as it could, in shades of green and brown that reminded me of the soggy bottom of a lake.

I shooed him away from the path and went inside. When I came to the door and found him sitting outside of it, I dropped a piece of cheese in front of him. I felt cruel only fifteen minutes later- I was fairly certain frogs could do nothing with cheese. The frog hadn’t left. There was an expression on his bumpy face that made me think of a child kicking their feet on a swing as they waited. I recall that after a full minute I had decided upon a name for part of his expression. He was decidedly smirking.

He jumped forward a little, close enough for me to hold, though I didn’t. “Thank you,” he said to me. His mouth moved strangely when he spoke, like it had to make awkward adjustments to the rest of his frog face to get words out.

“For what?” I said.

He shrugged a little, I’m sure. It was a movement like a cat shrug. Smooth and starting from the shoulders. But he finished with a shake of his rear. “Helping me off the path.”

“I didn’t really do anything. You hopped,” I said.

Gogu shrugged again. “The thought was there. Close calls do count, to me.”

Gogu stayed with me for weeks before he told me his age, before he told me his name and before he told me that he’d hidden under our abundant roses for a long time since hopping to the garden, and he had been speculating about who lay dead beneath them. I asked how long he had been under that rosebush, and how long he’d been wondering. Gogu had monumental patience, of the kind I would never have.

He knows that now. Just like I know what his face looks like when he’s just been smirking and is trying not to get caught at it.

Most of the guests looked like they had just fallen into the part of a yacht, and like the only problems they’d ever had were the kind that someone encountered on a yacht. There were men watch tans on their shapely wrists, and women with hair shined like the carapaces of iridescent, dark beetles. They looked at me when I appeared, took in my dress that was so white it was nearly blue, and nothing like the sort of dress I would have chosen for myself. Someone plucked a rose for me; I smelled it in front of them, which seemed the thing to do. They looked charmed as I played two narratives in my head, one was the rose in front of me, smelling sweet and summery, the other was a body in front of me, smelling acrid and dissolved. I smiled through it and moved on.

There were guests that I would never have invited, had I been consulted on the guest list at all. Neither of us liked to look at one another so we glared at one another from different spaces in the garden. We were all adept at being where our enemies were not. Unfortunately, because Evan was also where I was not, one of my enemies was stationed next to him. She looked unmovable and testy, as I imagined Cerberus looked stationed outside the gates of hell.

It somehow did not matter that Evan was on the other side of so much hairspray and hatred. He spoke to me anyway. “Lily. There you are. I was going to come looking for you.” He looked particularly devastating then, in that way that people can in a ring of lantern light and handmade Italian silk shirts.

“Well, you don’t have to now. Here I am.” This seemed self-evident, but people in my generation seemed t say self-evident things all the time. Evan looked satisfied with it. The stony quality of Cerberus’ face had increased by degrees. There were other, smaller and less relevant Cerberuses around her that also seemed to sense a disturbance in their night. They looked furious, and like they were furiously trying not to be. “Unfortunately. I mean, it’s not been that great, so far.”

“It could be better,” Evan said, diplomatically. “If you like dancing. Or if you want to go for a walk. I’ll have you back before the clock strikes midnight.”

I could feel my mouth grimacing and I tried to turn it into a smile. Evan’s expression said he’d seen the transformation, so I made as hasty a recovery as I ever have. “I like walks. I’m great at walking. You can watch. Come on.”

There was a stumbling moment in which he came to stand beside me and I pointed him the right direction and we walked and gathered gazes and focused on not returning them. He stared at my shoulders in the dress. I stared at the roses in the dark.

Gogu had a low opinion or balls and parties, and that this one was thrown in honour of my birthday did not change that. He had, for a few years, been disgusted by the fair offered, and how little control I had over it. It was an opportunity for my parents to flaunt their own popularity, he’d insisted, and subsequently insisted that I need not actually attend, because who would notice until it was time to blow out the candles on the cake? He’d been furious on my behalf when my mother had presented me with a dress that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. He was confused when I told him I would go, and shrugged when I tried to explain that obligation was a perfectly legitimate reason to attend an event, even if I lost hours of my life to it and aged prematurely before the end of the night.

“You’ll hardly eat because you’ll be nervous and tired,” Gogu predicted. “You’ll be bored by all the conversation, because you’ll have heard it or you won’t have because you already didn’t want to, and you won’t dance.”

“I won’t be bored by Evan’s conversation,” I said. I’d spoken to Evan enough times to know this to be the truth. “He’s the only one I’m really going to talk to.”

“Unless you faint, because you’ll hardly eat, because you’ll be nervous and tired.” Gogu’s tongue leapt and caught a gnat out of the thick summer air. He looked dissatisfied with its flavour, or my argument or both. “You’ll get bored of his conversation and you won’t dance.”

“It’s my own party. I have to go. Cerberus will be there.”

Gogu didn’t smile, but frogs can look incredibly self-satisfied. He looked as wickedly pleased as any sort of viper I had ever seen. “She doesn’t have to be.”

I shook my head at him. “Don’t say that. I don’t care if she comes, as long as she keeps away from me. I just want to choose what I wear and not have to make a grand entrance. And not to talk to everyone.”

Gogu snatched another insect from the air, this one of the stinging variety. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering near my cheek until it was between Gogu’s amphibian lips instead. He caught me staring. “Well, you already know that’s not going to happen, Lily. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“Nothing. I wasn’t asking you to tell me anything.”

Gogu considered me as he swallowed the angry insect. It might have been rattling in his throat but if it did, he didn’t show it. “I know. Just thought I’d say it anyway.”

Walking with Evan was almost exactly as I’d imagined. I smelled roses and felt heat jump between our shoulders. He was polite, only touching me to steer me, and keeping a polite distance between us. Our hands brushed. The wind shivered. The music was faint and then loud and then faint again. When I did see Cerberus’ face, it was violent as war.

We were living out a scene that would make anyone’s heart swell, and their hand flutter above their chest.

I knew Gogu was watching, though he wouldn’t reveal himself. He was only a shadow amongst other shadows.

“You look beautiful,” Evan said to me.

In the end, Gogu made my dress tolerable. Sometimes he disappeared and reappeared with trinkets. Shiny things he plucked off the street, as though he were a magpie rather than a frog. It was impressive that he managed to carry them from without to within the house and past my mother and the maid, who would have both tried to throw him in a French soup. I sometimes fantasized that they would see him, and each have a conniption. But those fantasies all ended poorly for Gogu.

This time it was not earrings or a necklace or a sewage-crusted ring he’d found all the way at the end of the drive that he brought back for me. It was one of the roses from the garden, which was perfect for securing to the front of my dress. It looked less unreal than it should have.

“If you’re going to act like a useless damsel, you should dress like it,” Gogu said, squatting on top of my chest of drawers as I fiddled with the petals. He watched me put on the shoes my mother had brought for me from some factory that did not pay their employees well enough.  “And this way, no one will smell you if you sweat.”

“Kind of you,” I said. “Don’t look.”

Gogu shut his eyes, though sometimes it was hard to tell. I also didn’t know if it made much of a difference, asking a frog to close his eyes. I kicked off the shoes, reached under the skirt of my dress, pulled off my jeans, and put the shoes on again. The cold fabric of the petticoat felt strange and sensual against my bare legs. Gogu’s eyes were open when I looked up again.

“Polka dots?” He looked at my skirt as though he could see my underpants through them.

I hissed, “Gogu!”

“I can’t see them now, calm down.”

It didn’t make a difference, really.

“The dress covers them up fine,” he said. “You just look uncomfortable in it. Too bad you can’t wear your jeans and boots. Not that I’m saying you should. I haven’t worn boots in a long time, so what do I know?”

This was one of the things I found interesting about Gogu. He had never told me exactly, but I was sure he hadn’t always been a frog.

Later, Gogu snickered at the lineup of cars in front of the house, like an automotive pageant. My own car wasn’t with them. It was up on blocks again, because it was always up on blocks, because giving up on the side of the road was how I knew it loved me.

“I like your Camaro better,” he said to me.

After I’d blown out the candles on my cake, and after Evan and I had both had a slice, some of which he’d tried to feed to me and I declined, he asked me for another walk. There was more intent in the shadows of his face now.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve done enough walking tonight.”

“It is pretty tiring to be walking around the whole time. Want to go sit somewhere?”

“I think I want to sit on my own for a while,” I said.

Evan looked at me as though he was beginning to realize something, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about this realization. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased to have figured out some sort of puzzle, or wishing he hadn’t known he was up against a puzzle at all. Eventually he said, “Maybe we could go out sometimes. After school or something?”

Because I could hardly believe it was my own voice saying it, I listened very closely when it said, “I just don’t think we should. Thanks for keeping me company.”

I left the ball and went inside, and maybe only Evan noticed, or maybe Cerberus did as well, or maybe my mother did and I was already in trouble. I didn’t watch to find out. There was a feeling in my throat that meant I was going to emote terribly, and it made me as uncomfortable as anything else that night.

In the garage, just in sight of the Fiskers and Porsches, my Camaro watched me dustily as I leaned against it, dirtying my skirt. The top half of my dress was a little sweaty. The only thing that really still looked lively and perfect was the rose on my bodice.

Gogu ate the last of the gnats as I joined him. He hunched down on the hood patiently. His eyes reflected the porch light, and then the rose, and then my face.

Gogu smiled, pleased as a viper.

Art by Ludovic Jacqz

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Nuclavees in America

I don’t believe in divinely-distributed responsibility. If something is my business, it’s because I’ve made it my business. Like my father’s business, before I killed him, was lousy first aid advice, consultation, and occasionally, practice. I had to wonder if he’d ever read the first aid books he had under the record-player in the den, because I had. I almost wished I hadn’t, sometimes, when I watched him search for the radial artery on a patient and wind up pressing his two fingers into the carotid. He could stitch up a cut just fine, and he knew all about disinfectant, but he’d been sewing up his own shirts and saddles for years, and he’d been drinking alcohol long enough to know that even though he was treating his insides with one kind, he could treat his outsides with another kind. He would offer the former to his patients before he doused their cuts or stab wounds or what have you with the latter.

There was nothing he could have done for himself, in the end. I remember that much about him. I could see his liver, his kidneys, his blackening heart and grey lungs, all through his skin, just before I cut out his spine. He’d once told me where to stab someone in the spine to cause a mobility-ending injury. It turns out, that if you dig hard enough into any part of the spine, that really does it, for mobility. “I made it easier,” I told him, while he twitched on the end of the kitchen knife. I pushed his hands away when he tried to grab me, but there wasn’t much power left in them. His skin was already collapsing around his organs, like a sped-up video of a deflating balloon.

There are quicker and cleaner ways to do it, I’ve learned. The papers covered and proposed several methods at first, to make it easier, and simpler, but only some of them have caught on. A kitchen knife was risky- close range. If my father were smart, he would have figured out that joints and angles didn’t mean so much in that state. I might have been behind him, but if he’d really tried, he could have reached behind himself and grabbed me. He would have looked truly monstrous. I don’t know what that would have done to Sonny. Golden-smiled Sonny, the only one of us to never have been called to the office for physical altercations, the only one to want to be a civil engineer and go to school after high school, already looked faint when I pulled the knife out of dad. Connor was just behind him, because it didn’t matter that we hadn’t wanted to drag Sonny through this dirt. He would be dragged through, and there was no way to clean him, so he might as well get comfortable with it. The couple months we’d spent trying to make sure the end of the world didn’t reach him seemed especially pointless then.

There was news that something similar had been seen before. Nuclavees was the name. It was all over the news. Every channel had an Irish or English or Scottish folk explaining the transparent skin, the monstrous deconstruction of the organs, and then positing a mythological explanation for the appearance of nuclavees all over the country. Across the pond, they were having a field day. Our epidemic was something they could peak. Have a look on the television, dear. They’ve got Nuclavees. I was looking into schools for Sonny when the news stopped being news and started being shadows in the back garden. Then we abandoned the notion of school altogether. Academia looks great on applications and resumes. It’s the lube of the future, my father once said. Creates opportunities for you to slide yourself in somewhere. What can lube do for a dying country, though?

Sonny was scared enough to give up right away. There was no waving a white flag, just cowering on the floor, behind the door, in the closet. Hands over ears. Eyes squeezed shut. And when courage pricked up its head, he watched through the window as I stood on the porch with the shotgun and Connor packed the Mustang. Every neighbour had either fled or had ceded to the Nuclavees. Wherever they’d fled to, hoping to hide, they’d still probably cede to the Nuclavees. In America, everyone cares about trends. And giving up seemed to be the largest trend since slavery. Whole families were becoming infected. They twitched and seized on the floor, turning prismatic, and rose up with skin like ghost flowers. They prowled. They stalked. They still bled and tore the stitches my father had given them.

Illness takes everyone, I’d told Sonny. It’s nothing worse than a deadly strain of influenza. You just have to deal with a few extra steps after the dying. It must have been our father’s eyes in the Nuclavee’s face that turned my brother’s brain into the twisted filament shape it was in now. The eyes were, for the most part, where eyes should be. The face around it had changed. It wasn’t what you expected to see around eyes like that. But eyes were just eyes, after all, I told myself. I’d read the first aid books: optic nerve, vitreous humor, schlera. Even looking straight into them, I knew those eyes weren’t my father. Everything in that face wanted to kill us.

We’ve taken the Mustang and the first aid kit and every tool in the house that could be made into a weapon. If we can’t take back our town, or our country, we can carve a path to another place. One where the eyes aren’t a problem. One where no one has a problem pulling the trigger or forcing the knife in. One where people knew to bandage their wounds so they didn’t pull and bleed and attract the attention of something that was human. There’s got to be a place like that somewhere in the world, and if there isn’t, then I’ll make one. And if a Nuclavee kills me first, then I reckon it isn’t a problem. How will I be able to care.

Connor drinks while I drive, and for now he’s treating his insides with the right kind of alcohol, because I don’t think he’s been driven to treat his insides with the other kind, yet. I might not be the best at patching people up, but I’m better than my father was. I can keep the blood where it’s meant to be, and that’s enough for now. And if it’s too late, if I’m looking at eyes that are only relatively where they should be, in a face that shows me much more of a person’s insides than it should, then it’s enough that I know that what’s supposed to be there, on the inside, isn’t. And I know how to treat that too.

Art by Arash Radkia

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Sanded Down

She had been killing for as long as she’d been able to hold things.

Her first was a mess of soap, warm with summer and malleable between her fingers. The soapy model killed her cousin. He was beyond saving the moment she drew the curve of his eyeball with her fingernail. She had not meant to. Then- five years old- she didn’t have the grace or precision to make anything but horrible Picasso-likenesses. It only barely looked like her cousin, to her, but she’d been proud of herself for picking up the soap in the first place and seeing a face in it. Two days later, her cousin had died.

Several more deaths, and a few years later, she went to the Mandel. The Mandel was a house as out of the way as could be when you were near the centre of the city. There was a lot to get accustomed to in the house. The roof was one, because it was constantly there, above her. The floorboards were another, because they were constantly under her feet. She thought she might singlehandedly wear the entire floor to a soft pulpy blanket with her pacing. She wanted out, badly. But not badly enough to kill people.

She lost both parents to it, and it was only because her aunt was estranged and had not seen her since she was an infant and too young to retain her aunt’s image, that she did not kill her aunt. Third time’s the charm, her aunt had told her, through a crack in the door. She stood on the opposite side of the room while her aunt held the door nearly shut and explained that it was clear now what was happening. The faces were to be removed. From pictures, from streets, from sight. There were to be no more faces in the world. There was a window with a sheet of film over it to keep the faces outside hidden. When she squinted through it she could only see the diffused colours that made up trees and joggers and bikers. Some days she squinted at the diffused colour spots until her vision went blurry and the spots reminded her of streetlights in the rain, with the light striking outward like starspray.

She hesitated to call the Mandel a prison, though by her seventeenth year, she could not remember whether or not she had agreed to the Mandel house. She didn’t think it mattered, as she agreed now. There were boxes of soapstone in the Mandel, and it was a lump from one of these boxes that she sanded when Andrew McKinnon arrived. He knocked first, to warn her of his presence, but he didn’t need to. She’d had the mask over her eyes the moment she heard footsteps on the stairs.

The mask revealed only his appearance from the knees down. He wore dark pinstriped slacks and dress shoes with green embroidery around them, as though the brogue patterns was not enough. He was interesting by virtue of non-matching socks with patterns of fruit on them. Watermelons on his left foot, and the makings of a disappointing fruit salad on his right. This seemed the most important detail, though she knew it was not; his feet faced her. It was brave of him to look her head on. She could easily remove her eye mask before he had the chance to hide his face.

“Good evening,” he said. She blinked, because it must have been later than she’d thought. She blinked a second time because her brain had only just caught up with the sound of his voice. She knew that voice. Responsible for some of the most precise sculptures in the world, and for the most intricately balanced Inukshuks in Canada. He was a boy-wonder. Michelangelo’s legacy at nine years old. Her mother, in fit of maternal interest, had delivered an article about him once to her.

“You sculpted a boar’s head two months ago, didn’t you?” Andrew said. The door closed behind him. He walked over. She tried to follow his brogues, tucking her chin against her chest to keep from seeing too much through the slit under the eye mask. “It was lovely. It could use some improvement, if you’re interested.”

“In, sculpting?” I repeated.

Andrew tapped something with his hand. His forehead or nose. “You’ve got it. Impressive. But really, are you interested? I don’t teach those who aren’t.”

He taught others who appeared on daytime television or did not have to live on the money made at seasonal conventions. “If you are interested, then really,” Andrew said to my glare. “Just sculpting. You would be great.”

“At sculpting,” she said.

She could hear the smile in his voice, just as she could see the restless shift of his feet.

The summer equinox crept in on the weekend, which usually meant it would creep in when Andrew was absent. The weekends were for pacing without the eyemask. She organized her soapstone people into lines on the side table. They were all done to resemble the senseless drawings of children. It was dissatisfying to file and pick out faces from the stone that might not exist in the world. She was just copying someone else’s work, she figured. She disliked watching Andrew’s brogues and mismatched socks disappear outside the door. She imagined he took off those socks and walked barefoot on sand some days, or he wore shorts instead of his slacks and walked beneath the sun and burned and felt the wind.

Her fingers were bored of sculpting. They would not stop sculpting.

She knocked her soapstone people to the ground. Only two of them chipped. Parts of them broke off into chunks and small slivers. She looked away from the film on the window and went about picking up the larger chunks. The other parts looked to her like the slivers of a piece of ice, and she liked seeing them on the floor somehow. She imagined she could use the sharp edge of one to scrape away some of the film on the window.

No one came to ask her if she was still all right staying in the Mandel or if she’d changed her mind since moving in.

Andrew joined her the next day and sat on a stool while she sat on the edge of her bed. She held the sliced away bottom of a cardboard box on her knees to catch the shavings. She tried to mimic what he’d shown her with his hands, another part of him that she could see. The file paid attention to his movements, and now she forced it to pay attention to hers. When the dust became too much, she wet the stone. The room smelled like polish, though she wasn’t anywhere close to polishing this figure yet.

“You don’t do any animals,” McKinnon complained. He smelled like coffee and yogurt. She was fairly certain he lived on yogurt. Like a fancy car, or a purebred animal, there was only one thing that could go into him if what you wanted out of him was art. Perhaps food other than yogurt foiled his talent.

“I don’t do planets either,” she said to him. “I thought you knew what I sculpted?”

“I had, but that didn’t prepare me for the possibility that that was all I had to look forward to. I’d thought you might branch out. My optimism runs on a separate track than the rest of me. Watch that edge.”

“What edge,” she said, feeling it. He wasn’t wrong; the edge was too severe.

“The one beneath your fingers. The one you’re trying to make sharp enough to cut yourself. Think of beach glass.”

She felt bitter, thinking of beach glass. Reluctantly, she filed away the sharp edge until it felt like it had been shaped by time and water instead of her hands. She heard McKinnon shift on the stool. His disappointment was just as evident in his voice as a smile. “That’s it?” he said.

“What’s it?” She turned her head toward him, but she didn’t tilt it.

“That. Your argument. You didn’t have to file it down.” He tapped the soapstone creature. His hands were long-fingered, with dusty finger pads. The smell of dust was almost as strong as the smell of yogurt. “It’s your piece.”

“You told me to file it down. You, my mentor,” she replied. “Acknowledged and famous sculptor. Prize-winning artist. Mentor to a murderer.”

“My god, the drama,” McKinnon said. “And none of those things makes me inherently right. Argue once in a while.” His hand disappeared, then his feet. The stool screeched against the floor as he stood.

“It’s over?” The clock was invisible with the eye mask, but it didn’t feel like he’d even been here two hours. The rest of the hours of the day seemed longer without him here to fill them with talking and advising and company.

“My optimism has been dented by all these figures,” he said. He gathered his bag and his sanding materials. She held the soapstone figure in her hand and filed half-heartedly. She would continue filing when he was gone, because her hands would not rest, and she would make a face out of a child’s drawing and hope that it resembled no one real. She still was not sure if he was leaving for a day or a week or forever. He had only been gone for three days at a time since he’d begun tutoring her, but it occurred to her that he could not return, and he could not return and not explain the not returning.

She couldn’t think of something to say to make him stay, because she wasn’t entirely sure why he was there in the first place.

When his steps descended the staircase, she took off the eye mask. The figure was smooth in her hand. It had chubby cheeks and eyes shaped like upside down moons. She hoped no one’s days had just become numbered. Through the film she watched McKinnon’s blurred shape disappear into the blurred shape of a car. Then the shape streaked away. Her hands were filing before she even looked at the figure again.

“If you want to know someone,” McKinnon had said, “show them a picture of themselves. A painting or a sketch or a sculpture. Their reaction will tell you what they think of their own image. If they think your image of them doesn’t do them justice, or makes them prettier or more fanciful than they are. Someone’s reaction to your own eye will tell you more than any self-portrait.”

“You like to be wise,” she’d said, “don’t you?”

She couldn’t see his expression, but he turned on the stool to face her, and she could almost feel his attention on her. He said, sunnily, “It’s nice to have my efforts recognized once in a while.” His voice so clearly held a smile that she felt it in her spine. Thinking about it made her skin prickle now.

Her skin prickled so much that she remembered, viscerally and strongly, wind on her skin, cold and wetness, and the elements. She remembered it all so strongly that the strength of it carried her up and out the door. Her eyemask, tucked into her belt, bouncing against her hip as she crashed down the stairs. She hadn’t been to the back door in some time. She didn’t know if there was still a grassy slope, a riverbank, an enclosure of trees, outside the door. Shoes? she wondered. No shoes, she decided. Just her feet in the grass, even if it was wet. There would be no shoeprints to tell anyone what a risk she’d taken.

It was by hitting McKinnon with the door that she did not see his face. She stumbled back as he clutched at his face. She saw his hand fly up and by the time she’d reflexively looked up he had his blazer pulled across his face with one hand. The other hand had shocked her, grabbing her about the arm to keep her from falling straight back.

“Don’t let me see you!” she ordered.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m being-“ she hesitated. “I’m staging a revolution.” She pulled out of his arm, because it was now distracting her more than balancing her.

“Viva la revolucion,” McKinnon intoned. “I’ll join you. Where to?”

He wasn’t about to drag her back inside. He still had his blazer covering part of his face, but he hadn’t told her to put on her eyemask. She described the riverbank.

He said, “onward”.

She hesitated. Her soapstone was upstairs. There was dirt, but she hadn’t sculpted something so soft in a long time. “My stuff is up-”

“I’m sure it is. But you don’t need it.” There was a pause. “I did say onward, didn’t I? I remember my mouth saying it. Let’s go, while the mystery sets in.”

The riverbank was green and yellow all over. It was a buttery, summery yellow. No autumn touched the trees here. The dirt outside the tree cover was baked. Beneath the tree cover it was just barely dry. She rolled up the cuffs of her pants and put her feet over the edge of the riverbank. Tree roots climbed from the soft wall of the river into the water, like mangroves. She’d seen pictures of mangroves before.  

She leaned back on her hands, then her elbows, then lay on the bank. Grass prickled her ears. The wind pushed her hair into her eyes and mouth. Her fingers remembered the textures of the real world. Her skin was beginning to remember there was more than soapstone out here.

Beside her, McKinnon was sitting with his back to her, but it was clear he was removing a lump of soapstone from his bag.

“I don’t see any animals here,” she said. “There’s nothing to make-” She waved lazily around, senselessly happy that there was so much to wave at – “except trees.”

McKinnon turned so she could see the slice of his earlobe but not his face. “I sculpt people as well.”

She shifted. “I’ll have to keep my eyes closed.”

“That would be preferable,” McKinnon said. “Please do, and I’ll try to finish this quickly.”

She put an arm across her face. This might interrupt his attempt to sculpt her, but he had seen her face many times before, and if she did not keep her arm there, then her eyes would betray them both. She felt the springy grass beneath her begin to yield and accept its new shape. She opened one eye very carefully for a few seconds to look at the overlapping pattern of leaves in the trees above them. She looked out beneath her arm, like she did with her eyemask, and saw McKinnon’s brogues, and his socks with tangerines and radishes on them. She heard him filing and sanding. There was a lot of sanding involved. 

When the productive noisiness ceased, she sat up. She looked up slowly, but this only meant that he had the time to hide the figure as well as his face by the time she got there. She could see a small rounded portion of soapstone between his fingers.

“I feel like I have a right to see it, as the model,” she said.

The smile was gone from his voice. “You know I wouldn’t show you your own face.”

Her tears sprung up quickly. They were of the variety that didn’t exist until they were already tumbling down your cheeks, so she took an embarrassing moment to wipe them away. She was only glad he wasn’t looking because she didn’t want him to see her tears or die, but she was ashamed the tears had happened at all. She stood up. “This was a good field trip.”

McKinnon stood up slowly, but he walked quickly up the riverbank, and hooked two fingers around the inside of her elbow. He smelled of yogurt and river mud. “So much drama. No one’s died today.”

She closed her eyes so he could kiss her cheek. She though of turning her head, but he’d already pulled away. She could not find his lips without opening her eyes.

“This isn’t a permanent solution,” McKinnon said. “You wouldn’t tear apart a mountain just because it avalanches now and again. You just keep people off the pass.”

“It’s a large pass to keep people off of,” she said. She felt jittery and alive with the kiss.

“There are ways,” McKinnon insisted.

She let him steer her back to the door while she looked at the sky and the grass and everywhere but him. Everything was sharper without the film over it. She remembered this too: the day getting colder and darker.

“It’s your turn again tomorrow,” McKinnon said. “A day off isn’t a day wasted, but two days off definitely is.”

She let herself smile. They parted ways at the door. She could see his car, clearly, for the first time, on the street. She knew he was going to walk to it and put his sculpture and tools in the backseat before he sat in the front. She knew because she has seen him bustle around the car many times before, through the film. She knew the feeling in the pit of her stomach, terrible and murderous without meaning to be. Her eyes were uncovered. She was too intrigued by the new sharpness of the world not to look.

He fell into the driver’s side. He had an ordinary face. His nose was long, his brows low, his mouth a little amused by everything he saw. The longer she looked at his expression, the expression he wore when he was thinking of nothing in particular, the easier it was to see his face emerging from a lump of soapstone.

Her fingers itched.

Her father had lasted the longest, at six days. She’d sculpted his face from play dough. He had been the last straw.

McKinnon must have climbed all the way up the stairs before he discovered she was no longer there. She wondered if he was out of breath because he’d hurried down to the riverbank to try to find her. She lay along the edge of the riverbank this time, stretched out as though she could role right into it. She held one hand in the water, so the water could soften and clean and polish.

“Revolutionizing again?” McKinnon said.

“The revolution is dying.”

“You have drama in spades,” McKinnon said, because he hand was still in the water.

She shook off the small sculpture before she lifted it out of the water. She cracked her eyes open and saw his face, saw his eyes sweep down her arm to the sculpture of her own face. Water ran down from her stone eyes.

The water hadn’t truly had time to soften, but she’d sanded it for a while.

Art by Ngyuen Thanh Nhan

Text by Lucie MacAulay

House Hunting

It was the sixth farm, and the one with the most barns.

The viewing began with laughter, which should have been a good sign. But the laughter was silent and it came from me because Devon had tripped on his way up the steps of the main barn. Devon scowled without looking at me, as though he were scowling at an audience. He often made faces that suggested there was an audience around to appreciate them, which was ridiculous. It was hidden-camera syndrome, except it didn’t happen when he was dressed nicely or on a trip. He woke up with hidden-camera syndrome and went to sleep with it. He probably unconsciously arranged himself in sleep to best appear in any candids, in the impossible occasion one were to be taken.

The realtor did not notice at all. She navigated the pitted-rotting porch floor well. I was sure one of her heels would get caught in a hole or nudge a knot in the wood and she would go down. It would be like watching a building fall. Not sideways, but cut out at the lower levels, all upper levels collapsing gracefully and catastrophically atop the knees. If it happened, he shellacked hair would remain untouched. Her ironed suit would probably either retain its shape or, if it were disturbed, would spring back into shape the moment the disturbance was removed.

The realtor turned the doorknob. Apparenty the door was unlocked, or the lock was broken. This barn looked like the most fixer-upper barn we had seen in the last two days. “Well, come in. Watch the door frame,” she advised. She stepped daintily over it. Devon took a large step to keep from tripping again. The look on the realtor’s face said she had seen Devon’s cautious type before. “It requires some work. But you mentioned that you wouldn’t be put off by that.”

She was referring to Simon and I, though she was only half-correct. Simon wasn’t put off by work because he often managed to avoid it. Not in a malicious way, but his mental bandwidth didn’t allow for heavy workloads. Frequently, as now, Simon’s mind was a half-world away from his body. His eyes were caught on the hole in the ceiling, and the hole in the ceiling above that. There was a profound amount of light shining through it but not enough of him was present to register the damage he was doing his retinas. I was mostly unimpressed by ceiling of floor holes, but I admitted there was something entertaining about one hole existing right atop another. There had been some signs when we’d breached the driveway that the barn (and surrounding barns and sheds) would be damaged in some way. The first sign was the path to the driveway, which was crowded with spiky varieties of nature. The second sign was the something that scurried across the porch steps and into the weeds that grew as high as the cracked windows.

“The property has to be expensive. How much is it?” I asked. I pushed aside what looked like a blanket but could have been a clump of leaves so moldy and wet they had clumped together like a net. The floor beneath it was stained a colour like rust, so I reasoned it was not a blanket.

The realtor had a file with all of this information. She opened it often, probably for something to pay attention to that wasn’t Devon. I could not fault her for this. I also could not remember her name, but I doubted she remembered mine. “Two hundred and thirty thousand. But it’s seven-thousand square feet in the main barn alone, which excludes two other barns. And the rest of the property, of course.”

“Two thirty for the lot,” Devon said. “Two thirty to spend hours out of every month to mow the entire thing. I could pay someone to mow my own lawn at home for less than that.”

I sometimes wondered if it were possible to overcome Devon’s stupidity-barrier by speaking louder. It didn’t do any harm. It was like speaking to someone who didin’t speak the same language as me.

“But the land is invaluable,” the realtor said. Her eyebrows wanted to judge us, I could tell, but she was keeping them neutral. “Properly used, it could help you make back that money. And there are three of you for the upkeep.”

I pretended she’d stopped a sentence earlier. “Devon, catch that?” I said loudly. The barrier was wide and strong. “Invaluable land here.”

This got Simon’s attention faster than it got Devon’s. He’d been looking at a few feathers and pile of bird crap on the floor. It was hard to make out what was feathers and what was fluff from a dated couch pushed against one wall. The light was abundant but it was also dim. Perhaps it was the sepia quality of the light that made it difficult to tell every shape apart, even from a small distance.

“We would have to actually work the land,” Simon said slowly. His thoughts must have taken him very far, on a path as winding as a filament in a bulb. Getting back was taking considerable effort on his part. He put a hand on the doorframe to ground himself. “We don’t really have a background in farming, just-“

He didn’t pause because he’d lost his train of thought; it just ended there. The realtor looked between us to see who would pick up the verbal slack. I explained, “We know animals. Barns. Ranches. Simon went to veterinary school. The barns would more likely be used for animals, as well as the land.”

“That makes sense,” the realtor said. She liked this logic, I could tell. “The last family here also raised animals. They had two children. They must have grown up knowing quite a lot about animals. Do you know much about farming animals?”

Simon made a face at me from the hallway, just outside the door of the main room. He mouthed ‘kitchen’ at me. He was glowing, which meant that the kitchen probably had something roosting in it, or it looked like an abandoned apothecary’s shop. I was starting to feel two hundred and thirty thousand dollars lighter already.

“Only what I learned from my parents,” I told the realtor. Devon looked down at the floor and frowned, but not at what I’d said, just as the thing he was toeing with his boot. It looked like hair, like a lock of hair from a child or lover that someone might keep in a locket. It was perfect and red.

Devon prompted, “Tell her about your parents.”

I said, “She has better things to do.”

The realtor’s smile agreed with me. Six barns in probably had her never wanting to speak to us again. “Would you like a tour?” she asked.

A tour would likely bring us to sunset. We would be driving the corkscrew turns back to town in the dark. The sun was already low, bleeding across the hood of Devon’s Pontiac. It was a Pontiac from a commercial, all glowing and the colour of aggression. It could not convey Devon’s insecurities better if it had been designed to do so.

“Why not? Simon, come on.”

Simon came on. He slowed us down, running his hands over every surface. There was something to investigate in every room. A kitchen with the shelves of a non-functional fridge piled on the counters made Simon touch each shelf before we moved on. The realtor led us through a sitting room and a second living room and a dining room that had half of a table and one chair with a cushion ruined by rain and age. Simon vanished twice to look at bookshelves where the only books left were rotting, and a wall hanging across from a window, all the colour bleached out of it by multiple midday suns.

Devon made noises of approval or disapproval. He clearly disapproved of the entire property. The only thing he approved of was the thought of Simon and I rising to the task of fixing it up. I didn’t try to assign words to his noises; it just seemed pointless, like humanizing a creaking door.

“You said it wasn’t empty for long. Where did the previous owners even live?” I asked the realtor. On her other side, Simon looked at the cracks in the plaster of the hallway. He followed one crack to a damaged baseboard, and then a tiny boot beside the baseboard. His nose wrinkled as he poked it with one finger. The boot wouldn’t fit any baby I’d ever seen.

The realtor opened her file. I wondered how much of the answer she already knew and how much she actually needed to confront the file. “They stayed on the top floor. It was well-maintained, I understand. There was no central heating, so they kept the radiators on upstairs. They lived in the half without roof damage, naturally. Would you like to take a peek?”

“Naturally,” I said. Simon was easily delighted by the barn, because he hadn’t considered upkeep and that he might be involved in it. The delight was delightful, but my decision had ultimately been made by Devon, whose mouth and nose were twisted as if he’d smelled something awful.

Upstairs was full of rooms. Rooms everywhere. Doors as far as the eye could see. The corridor ended with a door. Each one was filled with either darkness or light, it was like looking into different versions of the afterlife. Everything smelled like wet oak leaves. The realtor looked into her files. It was safer here to do so than downstairs- the floor had not yet begun to waste away.  

“These four rooms are liveable,” the realtor said, gesturing. She stepped into one. “The master bedroom.” We followed her in and spread out quickly, like mice. The room was spacious, surprisingly so. I was amazed at how easily we all fit in there without encroaching on one another’s personal space. Our ideas of personal space were ambitious and grand and inarguable. It was all white-washed floors and walls, and a couple bureaus on either side of the bed covered with china dolls.

“Those must have belonged to the children,” the realtor said. All of our eyes must have been on the dolls. “Cute.”

Simon stepped closer to the dolls to inspect them, but not too close. Clearly he was feeling as dubious about them as the rest of us. His expression was dreamy, imagining moving his own lamp and books in this space once the dolls had been cleared away. He looked at his hand, where he held the microscopic boot, and then at the bare china foot of one of the dolls. Devon glared at the dolls and then the realtor for daring to impress Simon.

“What’s the square footage of these rooms by themselves?” I wondered.

The file opened. “A bit over thirteen hundred square feet. Perfect to stay in while you work on the house. And a viable option for renting out later. Or for moving more people in.” She said this last part with a look at Simon and I, as though one of us would be trying to cram one of our university or high school friends in here soon.

“People who aren’t us,” Devon said with the subtlety of a natural disaster.

Devon looked obviously at his watch and tapped his hands on his legs as I stepped a little closer to the dolls. They looked well looked after. I could not tell if this was a function of the children that had owned them, or if china dolls were simply resilient. There wasn’t much organic about them. The elements wouldn’t just weather away their painted smiles or glass eyes. They were probably the best-preserved things in the barn.

“Did the children not want to take their dolls with them?” I asked the realtor, because this many china dolls could not have been inexpensive. They were well-crafted, with sculpted curls and pleated skirts and shoes as shiny as their glass eyes. I would have been afraid to touch them as a child, in case I dirtied or dropped one. I began to count them, but the realtor interrupted my train of thought.

The file flipped open in my ears. She flicked paper. “The children were getting too old for it to be safe.”

“Pardon me?”

More paper sounds. “The children got too old to play with them and the dolls began to get aggressive. They were too difficult to remove so the family just moved instead. I’m sure if you don’t engage, they won’t be a problem. They mostly just don’t like to be abandoned.”

Simon’s dreamy expression had vanished. Devon made another noise that conveyed disapproval, but it was so surprised this time that I didn’t mind it. “The dolls got aggressive?” I repeated.

“They aren’t always like that,” she said.

“But they can be?”

The realtor closed her file. She sounded bewildered, as though she’d already answered my question and couldn’t understand why I was asking it a second time. “They’re just dolls. They don’t like to be forgotten, that’s all. They’re meant for play. You can play with them if you’d like, of course.”

Devon snorted. The snort turned into a laugh. “What’s the real reason they left them behind?” As soon as he said it, I felt stupid. I should have recognized the realtor’s humour. I delivered many of my own jokes as if they were fact. Simon bent down in front of one bureau. If one of the dolls had been holding a pin, he was within range for them to stick him in the eye with it. He inspected their motionless eyes. Each one was green or blue, as perfect as fairy tales.

“Don’t do anything with them,” I said. “We should contact the last family that lived here first, and see if they still want the dolls.”

Simon rolled his eyes.

“Do you think we could get the contact information of the last owners?” I said. “I wouldn’t feel right just moving these around or packing them away if someone still wants them.”

Nothing moved. Nothing moved at all on the bureaus but I swear something had changed. As if a different air had blown into the room. As if I’d become aware of some sort of creature nesting in the room without turning around to see it. No one touched a single surface, but something whispered, like the rustle of pleats moving against one another.

“Before that,” Devon said, “Do you think we could find where the realtor’s gone?”

Art by Matthias Haker

Text by Lucie MacAulay