St.York

There was a movement, a brief one, where people wanted to call it The New World. It was short lived because everyone knew, right away, that to call it The New World was to acknowledge that there was an Old World, and no one wanted to remember that. If we didn’t say After, there didn’t have to be a Before.

But there was. The world had been edited viciously, pared down, pieces cut out, reformed to put new protagonists at its forefront. Kill your darlings. And the ones left over weren’t darlings. What was left over was a world as focused and sharp as a knife, made of horsepower and adrenaline and streets glazed by street lamps and headlamps.

It would have been my place once, because I longed to live in this kind of world. If I were a car, I’d be the car swerving around the corner in a chase scene, bellowing at the top of its lungs, and this was the place for that now. But I didn’t feel on the inside the way anything outside of me looked anymore. Apparently I looked the same though, because someone recognized me.

“Holy shit. Cole St.York? Cole St.York, no way!” There was a hand on my shoulder that only stayed attached to an arm because I swivelled before I had my butterfly knife fully out of my pocket. The person attached to that arm must have been inoculated to jumpiness by exposure, because he didn’t look stung at all. His gaze instead said he loved me and everything about my drugs-sex-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle. “Holy shit. Oh man. Man. I thought you were dead. I’m so glad you’re not dead. St.York is alive- yes! Do you have it? Where is it? Please tell me you’ve still got your guitar.”

No guitar. It didn’t have the mettle to survive in the new world. I was surprised this guy did. He looked delicate, like he might crack if you dropped him on the ground. He looked like he needed casing. I probably looked like casing, with the puncture scars on my wrists and my military jacket. I looked quickly at his neck, where his pink skin covered his veins neatly, healthily. I let go of the butterfly knife in my pocket. “Nope.”

“You could easily find a new one. You’re still playing, right? I’ll be so crushed if you say no, man, you don’t even understand. There’s some great places you could play. You got a band, still? What happened to the rest of them?”

Dead, probably. I said, “dead, probably.”

His face didn’t like that. His mouth moved on ahead anyway. “Yeah, well. Music survived, so whatever. You can find a band. Hey. My buddy drums.”

Music had survived, so the musicians survived with it. There wasn’t a lot of choice in this sleek, efficient world, but there was a bassist (Raymond), and a drummer (Juliet). No one on keyboard, but I still played. Raymond came up with bass lines slowly, but once he did, it was angry and carnal; the poverty of the sounds coming from my guitar was never so obvious. It was perfect. The music we made was better than anything I had played before, because everything was flavoured with aftermath, and miles away from recovery. Everyone wanted a reminder that they’d come close to going, and instead they’d stayed, and this music scraped like we’d scraped along, and reminded the people of the little victory of being alive.

Gigs helped the nights blur together, and the more they blurred, the faster time passed. Inside the venues, we waited for the techies to set up our instruments, except Raymond, who handled his bass alone, and then we played and played. It was easier to pretend we were in the Before, and that it hadn’t happened yet and might never. There was less variation in the audiences, fewer people and not a chance at seeing someone older, but if you looked at the light long enough, you couldn’t even make out faces.

Outside of the gigs, the world was irrevocably changed and wouldn’t let us forget it. We’d leave Juliet to meditate or sleep or whatever in the apartment. We went to find food, and new venues. Sometimes we sat on the hoods of cars in the business district, expensive cars that businessmen had driven and were never coming back to. We pretended not to notice the changes in our city. Abandoned cars rusted and slowly sank on their flat tires. Gardens were overrun and the houses behind them all dark, all the time. All the schools had been repurposed or left alone. I hadn’t seen a kid in ages. I hadn’t seen a grey hair in years. The only ones on the street were young, strong, cruel, rich, fit, intelligent.

There were the leftovers, too. Leftovers lived in boxes in coolers on street corners. The sellers sat on the sidewalks next to them, no calling out, no needing to entice people. People were enticed, by their own desperation and need for survival. They paid for and scurried away with a box of leftovers, which was always in black glass, and sweating with condensation.

Raymond looked at the boxes, and the sellers, every time. He looked, always, unable to accept himself if he didn’t. I looked and then looked away. I counted them until I lost track, and I tugged the hem of my sleeves down over the puncture marks. When I got home, sometimes I opened them up again, just to remind myself there was blood under there. My veins worked fine.

I hadn’t had the taste for meat in years.

I didn’t want Raymond to know, but I guess I wasn’t very invested in hiding it either. He held my eyes for a moment after he caught a glimpse of my wrists. Some days, I felt my veins throbbing, when my heart was pumping at its regular speed. I wondered if he could see it, when we were wrapping out our equipment. He shut his case and picked it up without locking it. His bass almost slipped out before he fumbled it back into the case.

I’d never been aware of my veins before, but now it was like sediment sat in them. A little weight in each wrist and elbow where there hadn’t been any before.

Juliet waited behind the stage after one of our gigs, arms crossed, as a couple of techies unplugged and de-rigged. Her expression was pacific the way the ocean is pacific over a trench. Only her fingers digging into her arms were really losing it. “We thought you were Turned.”

Well that wasn’t my fault. Assumptions. I grabbed a bottle of water. “That was your mistake.”

“Hey, St.York,” said Victor, who had been managing us (mostly following us) since he found me on the street a few months ago, “you need to get some leftovers into you.”

There was no world in which I would eat the leftovers.

Juliet pushed me into the wall hard. My shoulder blades stung. I handed my guitar off to someone who would treat it more gently than I was. “Where the hell are you going to get leftovers? I know you- you’re not going to pay for them, Cole. So what? Is it going to be one of us? Do we have to drive you out? Do we have to make you leftovers before you do it?”

“There won’t be much of you for leftovers if you don’t let me go, tiger,” I said. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not looking to make you a meal.”

There was a microphone within grabbing distance of Juliet. Victor and Raymond’s presence might have been the only thing preventing her from grabbing it and swinging it at me with full force. She shoved me back again as she stepped away, like an extra precaution. Even in this sleek world, everyone was taking precaution. No one wanted to be edited out. “If you die, we have to find a new guitarist. And you’re good. But not good enough I won’t kill you if you try to make leftovers out of me.”

I said, “Again. Don’t flatter yourself.” Juliet let me go, with a smile that conveyed much more of the opposite of a smile. Raymond’s expression was more pitiful and hostile than any of Juliet’s words, somehow. I thumbed at the veins throbbing in my forehead and swallowed down my hunger.

The survival rate had suffered for seven years before it started looking up. In the first month of that seven years, a third of the population died in a whirlwind. Everyone was breathing their last breath before someone could even tell them they were sick. Every newsfeed warned us to watch our veins, and if they stood out too much, or began to turn grey, like the skin of a corpse, we were sick. No one advised going to the hospital. No one advised anything except staying away from the infected so you weren’t infected yourself.

The ones who didn’t die right away became hungry. You’d never heard so many people complain about hunger, or seen them so desperate for food that their mouths were ringed with grey and they were vomiting beside the roads. It had been weeks since I’d seen Jared, months since I’d kissed him, but I’d been hungry since. Exposed. Everyone was exposed and the hunger was just taking root.

The first to feed found out what that dead third was for. Some cultures ate their enemies to acquire their strength or abilities. Our culture aped them. Survival came in the form of leftovers. It was eat the dead, or become one. We’d found the cure, and it was us.

Seven years since the outbreak, and we were coming back finally.

If I weren’t sick, I wouldn’t have noticed that Raymond was too. I wandered into the kitchen for a meal I knew I wasn’t going to find in the fridge for the fourth time that day and ran into Raymond, leaning against the counter, looking at the fridge and thumbing his wrist. He licked his lips.

I watched Raymond throw up after a set. Sometimes the hunger did that. Made you hungry enough to turn on itself. “Attractive,” I said as he slumped over the bowl.

Raymond lay his cheek on the seat and gave me a smile that said everything opposite of a smile. “You do it prettier, St.York?”

“I think it’s getting you faster than me.”

Raymond shook his head a little, as much as he could with it still pressed to the seat. His lips were grayish. “You just think you’re invincible. Rock star problems. Get some leftovers, would you?”

I was having a hard time believing Raymond would suggest this. “You said you knew a kid once who became leftovers. You said your sister-”

Raymond retched. His eyes were open but I could tell he thought they were closed. For a moment, they weren’t seeing anything. “Those leftovers are just leftovers. No one’s coming back for what’s in those boxes. They don’t have a chance anymore. You do.”

“Do you think guitarists make more than bassists, Ray, really? How much money do you think I have?” I sat down on the floor, between the toilet and the sink. It was cramped there. I couldn’t move out of Raymond’s line of sight when his eyes focused again. “If I had that money, I’d be taking you out for a meal. You’re the one who deserves it, between the two of us.”

Raymond scoffed. A little of his colour had returned. A vein still throbbed in his neck. “That logic doesn’t work here anymore, St.York.”

Our next gig came four days later, at a club Raymond and I had scouted. I showed up and ate two burgers and some Kraft dinner, and chased it with three bottles of water and a shot. It would never stop the hunger, but it would stop the nausea for a while. I gasped a little when I’d finished drinking.

Victor and Juliet didn’t look at me until I’d finished. They looked anywhere else as they set up the drum kit. Someone had brought out Raymond’s bass, but someone was also setting it up for him.

“Where’s Raymond?” I asked, taking a step toward the bathroom.

Juliet looked savage as she seized her drumsticks. For a moment, I thought she might run someone through with them. The guy setting up the bass looked away. Victor carefully reached into his bag, resting on an amp. His voice was efficient, all the emotion edited out of it. “He wanted you to have this.”

He handed me the black glass box. Warm to the touch with all that was left of Raymond. 

Art by Chiara Bautista

Text by Lucie MacAulay

What We Find In the Trees

It always seemed plausible that Greg Miller was from somewhere else.

I knew him back when I used to draw. I had several sketchbooks of different paper, though I didn’t know what the difference in the paper meant. The grain was smoother, the paper absorbed more ink- were they meant for being covered with watercolour waves or inked faces or gesso or charcoal or what? In the end, I drew animals. Digging, flying, leaping, burrowing, looming, lunging, tearing. Sometimes I drew them with faces. Mostly I didn’t. I went through my pens quickly. They either ran out of the ink or I pressed on them so hard the nib broke and drawing became scraping the ink out over the paper.

I wanted a pen I wouldn’t break, or a pencil that wouldn’t smudge. I had more than a few pages where the ink of my pen had run through and dictated the content of the drawings on several subsequent pages. One became a constellation, to accommodate for the blot. One became an animal with black tunnel eyes. One became a black-eyed susan.

Greg liked to look at my drawings. And in exchange, he showed me where he liked to climb trees. He showed me the tree he particularly liked in the field of crab apple trees on the way to school. When I closed my notebook, he gestured me over to the tree and pointed up. He said, “That’s why I climb this one.”

Up the tree, the light was immediately inconsistent and unpredictable, like an animal’s dappled pelt, if the animal were in motion. It seemed to shift even when there was no wind to move the trees. Every shadow might have been a vehicle for a small tree-dwelling creature to move undetected from one spot to another. The bark had deep lines, as though each piece of it had been stuck on the tree very loosely, and a few good tugs would de-nude the whole thing. It was a satisfying tree to look at. Maybe that’s what Greg was feeling when he climbed into its branches. Satisfaction.

“And I found you this,” Greg said. It was a pen, with a nib so sharp I almost didn’t see it. I held it in front of my face like it was evidence and I a crime investigator of sorts. I knew before I pressed it to my notebook page that it would never run, and that the nib wouldn’t break. Drawing with it looked more like I was gouging a layer of the paper away to reveal the black underneath.

“Quality find, Miller,” I said. “Where did you find it?” He usually found things in field, or by roadsides, or outside shops (though he always tried to return those, if they originally belonged to the shop) or other places where you wouldn’t expect a sixteen year old boy to be. I knew this because I’d known Greg for a while, and I knew that he, embarrassingly, wasn’t embarrassed by the things most sixteen year old boys were embarrassed by, like walking through fields on the way to school, or marching into a shop with what was possible misplaced or stolen goods. He was honest like that, and just hadn’t figured out that at sixteen, no one expected honesty, and girls our age (and boys) didn’t appreciate it. He was good and reliable, and everyone at this age was trying out adrenaline-steeped hormones and thought the best way to deal with the trouble they brought was with more adrenaline and hormones. If he were a car, intelligent businessmen or practical parents would drive him. But sixteen year olds want Mitsubishis they can wrap around trees, never mind that it would take a specialist and a lot of money to repair them.

I didn’t like cars in general. Which is why Greg and I walked together.

“I found it in the tree,” Greg said, adjusting his backpack straps. He was the only boy I knew who actually wore both straps, securely, instead of just the one.

“In the big one?” He didn’t seem to realize this wasn’t something you could just say to people our age. He was this earnest with everyone, and I didn’t know how to tell him that maybe he shouldn’t mention to our classmates that he was regularly up in a tree.

He smiled with his whole face. It was a smile you saw as much around his eyes as in his mouth. “That one, yeah.”

“That’s something. I wonder who left it there. How do you find these things, Greg?”

“I go looking for them. It’s an effort. Like your drawings. Can I see?”

I twisted my bag around halfway, because I did only wear it on one shoulder. I skipped through my drawings to the most recent ones. When he looked at them, his face looked truly interested, not interested for the sake of flirting, or for the sake of assessing. He didn’t pretend or criticize anything.

“I like this one,” Greg said, pointing at one of the pages in my sketchbook as we walked. It was one of the animals with human faces. I drew the human faces with as much detail as I drew the animals, so every crease was visible, every hair in the eyebrows, every slanted cheekbone. They looked strange and disturbing, which I knew because they tended to disturb people in my class, but Greg liked the details.

“Thanks,” I said, closing my book.

The pen stayed with me for a while, until I almost forgot there was a time before I was using the pen. This sounds like ages, but two weeks can be an eternity at sixteen. I forgot too that Greg gave it to me, his tree-find, until I was using it in class and he was speaking. We had Mr.Baird for Introduction to Anthropology, Psychology and Sociology. He liked to assign us helpful readings and not go over them, though he said the material would be on the advanced placement test. In that class, the seats were arranged like a horseshoe, so Mr.Baird could lecture us from the middle. Greg sat perpendicular to me, five seats down, with his bag between his feet, his elbows on his desk, and his back pressed to the back of his seat, every time. Every other seat that contained a boy in it smelled like Axe body spray. Greg didn’t smell like anything.

We were reading Lord of the Flies, because apparently that was a wealth of knowledge in IAPS. Mr.Baird asked a question, some boy responded, girls tittered, and Greg said, seriously, “I don’t think it would be the same if they were all girls. There’d be more talking and working things out, probably. I think the point of the story is that they’re boys, and what they think of as masculinity is a handicap here.”

The girls tittered louder. The boys guffawed. People exchanged knowing looks. Not because the answer was wrong- it was right. My stomach squirmed, like I was watching someone trip in the hall or talk with something in their teeth. Why had no one ever explained to him that if he just wasn’t so sincere, there would be no tittering or guffawing? Why didn’t Greg just figure it out for himself. He didn’t seem bothered by the girls or the boys, or even seem to notice them. He held his book open and addressed Mr.Baird directly with a serious expression.

He always had that expression in class.

We walked to school next Tuesday. Greg showed up when I passed his street and said, “Draw anything new? Pen still good?”

I didn’t get out my sketchbook, because he hadn’t asked to see it. If he wanted to see it, Greg would ask. “It’s the Arthur of pens. The once and forever ruler of writing Albion. It’s Excalibur. Kings seek it. Magicians have visions about it.”

“Good,” he said, sincerely pleased. “Hey, I found something else in that tree.”

“Cool. What?”

“It doesn’t have anything in it,” Greg said, handing them to me. He had to be right, because the eggs weighed nothing at all. It was like they held ghosts, or they’d already been cracked open and abandoned, except that there were no cracks or punctures. They weren’t speckled. Instead they had a pattern on them like the veins of a leaf. I tried to commit them to memory, so I might sketch one of my animals with faces emerging from one later.

“Did you find them in a nest? They must have come from some bird,” I said. Greg shook his head. “Maybe something hid them in the tree because it thought they were food.”

Greg gave me one of his full-face smiles, using all the muscles of his face. I had thought a couple times about putting that face on the head of one of my animals, but my sketchbook had been stolen before, and peeked at, and ridiculed, and now I knew never to draw in it anything that I couldn’t stand to expose to tenth-graders. And walking into school with Greg Miller was an entirely different thing to drawing his face.

People still stole my sketchbook in grade ten, only this time it was the boys and they didn’t do it as loudly. They just picked it up and turned the pages and hoped I would struggle. But I’d learned already that struggling only made it worse. Adoption a cloud of boredom around you made it tolerable. I didn’t even mind their stupid, smirking faces anymore. I said, “Bored already with your own life, Elias?”

“You look like you’re bored with yours,” Elias said. He did recognize some faces, but they were drawn in an ugly sort of style that could only mean I was mocking the people I drew, and no one liked our phys ed teacher, or the substitute that came in to teach math when Ms.Ziliotto was gone. He still found the animals strange, but he’d told me that before and already knew I wouldn’t rise to it. There was nothing to set off here.

“Well A plus plus,” Elias said. I could tell he really did like the drawings, even though he’d never say it.

I just took back my sketchbook without saying anything. That was the trick that I was so proud of learning, that it was best to say nothing, to make them think I wasn’t even bothered enough to answer.

Greg continued to find things in the tree. I hardly ever saw the tree, because unless Greg was walking with me and drew attention to it, I forgot that we even passed it on the way to school. I was thinking about other things, like keeping my soccer uniform dry in a mesh bag I stuffed under my raincoat on the way to school. My sketchbook would survive. I kept plastic bags in my backpack to wrap around my sketchbook, ever since I’d run home in the rain with one once and found have of the pictures bled into inky clouds.

Greg appeared with an umbrella. “You’re going to get wet,” he said, as he hoisted it over us. It didn’t cover us both completely, so his left shoulder became instantly damp. His backpack was still on both shoulders, and part of it was getting wet. I wondered if he’d put his homework in a plastic bag. It seemed a very deliberate and Greg thing to do.

“I never remember umbrellas exist,” I replied. “I didn’t even know it was supposed to rain. I don’t check the weather. Thanks. Were you up in the tree?”

Climbing the tree in the rain, despite how dangerous it might be, also sounded romantic and like a day dream and therefore entirely like something Greg would do.

“Yep. Look at this.” Greg pulled something out of his pocket, the size of a leaf.

It wasn’t a leaf. It was the thickness of the bark on the tree, but it wasn’t bark either. I’d only seen scales like that on reptiles, but not in that colour. It was iridescent, and the longer I looked, the more colours I saw. It gave me a feeling in my stomach, like the sort of primal feeling you get when you’re looking at something you know instantly is a predator.

I didn’t remember that scale, really, until the end of the day. This was because I spent most of the day feeling sorry for Greg. In IAPS we were meant to share one of our childhood memories that made us feel sadness at the time. We were later going to reflect on how it made us feel now, but first we had to sit through thirty-one students reading aloud stories of losing pets or walking past “hobos” on the street. Greg’s one-paragraph story informed the class of a friendship that had broken up because of distance, and the way losing that girl told him that things don’t last, and how he wished he’d known she was going to leave so he could say goodbye properly. He didn’t say it for sympathy. He meant it. Which is why, by the time he was done, there was more snickering than I’d ever heard in our classroom. It took four full minutes for Mr.Baird to get us to move on.

I died a little in my seat, watching and listening. If Greg heard the commotion, you couldn’t tell. He sat back in his seat and waited for Holden, beside him, to speak.

You can’t just say serious things, just because you mean them, I wanted to tell him. I didn’t think that was something that would ever change, when I was sixteen.

I remembered the scale later, when we were walking home. We shouldn’t have been, because I should have been at soccer practice, but it was canceled due to the rain and Greg was already outside the field with his umbrella and he was playing with the scale in his hand when we started walking. “How high up did you find that?” I asked.

He said, “A little higher up than the eggs.”

Greg continued to be sincere, and he continued to say things he meant, and at some point I wondered if our teachers disliked him, because they must have known that complimenting his work in front of our classes would just make the half-audible laughter inescapable. Our English teacher told him he was a sweetheart. Michele, coming up behind us as we were leaving, agreed loudly and meanly with our teacher.

I remember that as a moment when I was suddenly worried about whether or not I was a good person. I was furious about what Michele had said, and I vowed to never say something so horrible. But I was more furious with Greg than I was with Michele. For not grasping the easily acknowledgeable facts about high school. For not seeing, despite how obvious it was, that there was a point to popularity and that it was easily attainable. I was furious with him for the second-hand embarrassment. I knew I shouldn’t be, and for a moment I thought less of myself for my misdirected anger. It didn’t stop me wanting to tell him to just hold his backpack over one shoulder or wrinkle his pressed collar.

I caught up with Greg, one of those days, as he was walking to school. Which never happened, except when I was late to school and he was walking ahead, apparently. I walked beside him for a few minutes with the air around us sucking up the sound of my footsteps like a vacuum before I finally said, “Hi, Miller.”

Greg let the silence stretch out long and smooth before he spoke. His voice sounded far away and echo-y. “How’s the drawing going?”

The drawing was going well, as usual, so I said, “Peachy. It’s that pen. Like I said. Arthur’s pen.”

Greg smiled. Then the smile vacated his face. There was no bag on his shoulders. The silence slipped from smooth to sharp. The vacuum pulled words straight from my throat. “Go looking for anything today?”

Greg said, “No. But I found something anyway.”

I waited for him to explain what it was, or to bring it out of his bag, but there was no bag, and no explanation forthcoming. I considered asking him about it, but he’d never not shown me before, without my asking. I felt this might be the closest Greg would ever come to telling me not to ask him.

I showed him another animal I’d drawn, this one with scales like the one he’d found in the tree. I had to use green and blue pens for the iridescent shine in the scales’ ridges. It didn’t look like any animal that existed, more like the way I pictured an animal, except I couldn’t picture it fully, so it was more a picture of an idea of an animal.

“I like it,” Greg said, with complete sincerity.

Greg didn’t walk with me the next day. He didn’t come to school. Or the day after that. I drew a close up picture of the scale. The more I looked at it, the less it looked like tree bark. The more it looked like it wasn’t done with whatever animal it had come from, like the air was dissonant around it, like it was trying to go back to where it had come from.

Greg’s backpack hung on the doorknob when I left for school the next day.

The straps were perfectly even, like he’d just adjusted them for his shoulders, and it looked like it had been hung up in a tree for a year. There was a crust of dirt on it, and a green stripe that looked like the paste you got from grinding a leaf between your fingernails. There were twigs in mesh pockets and a long string of leaves stuck in the zipper. I picked it up and weighed it, but it didn’t feel like there was anything inside of it. If Greg was putting things like scales in it, though, it would be hard to tell. There might had been several scales in this bag. Or maybe it was done collecting things.

I tugged the zipper open, which meant tearing apart the leaves and scattering plant matter and small dirt clods. It was dirty business, really dirty, for finding nothing inside. There were some muddy streaks on the driveway where someone had scuffed their shoes. The muddy streaks made a path, and I thought about taking it. It was different to imagine something, and imagine truly doing it. When I imagined doing it, I imagined keeping the bag with me, taking its dirt onto my hands, and skipping school, and putting my own backpack down, and all the sensations that came with the day that would unspool if I followed the footprints.

I put the bag down inside the door. I had two days of school left before the weekend, and nothing to stop me following muddy footprints all over town if I wanted to. Soccer was finished for the season. I had time for this later. I moved the bag into the garage, to keep the dirt off the floors.

I got to school more quickly when I wasn’t walking with Greg. I sat in IAPS and listened to group presentations and everything was quiet as I drew animals with regular animal faces next to my notes.

We didn’t clean out the garage until recently, where I found the bag again. No footsteps to accompany it this time.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Between Me And The Sea

I always thought it would be a wave that would take me down. Down beneath the water. And when I saw the restless waters, I knew it would be soon. I have never been struck hard with the illness of fear, but then it was a potent and deadly as plague. It was a burden, like the top of a casket, prepared to keep me down and under. It was not infectious, because no one else looked away and considered leaving the shore.

“It is not like you to not eat,” Eiluned said to me. “All of this worry, it must be a terrible burden for humans. You should forget it. Haven’t you had all the saving you could want in one life?” She touched my cheek, as though it were still dark and warty, or as though I was still a child, though I hadn’t been for a long time. “You are the safest you could be here.” She laughed, which sounded like waves rippling and made me think of silver foil, and of the currents that spin under the water.

Eiluned looked exactly like a moonchild, which is what many of her kind looked like. They were all cut from the same cloth, made to look like the moon beneath the water. Her hair was more silvery than her skin, but they both made her luminous sometimes. Her kind were all moon-tinted, but I had seen them curl up in riverbeds, and their skin changed quickly enough I can’t tell that I could not tell if they were lurking or if they had truly gone.

The other faeries didn’t seem to care that I’d been left behind when the town moved. They weren’t very happy about it, either. They preferred the children with moondust hair and starlight eyes. I was as colourful as dirt, and my face had never looked innocently adolescent. It wasn’t just age that made me ugly to them. Their strange faces twisted with something like disgust when Eiluned tugged me into the water and combed my hair wet, or when she touched her finger to the space between my dark brows, or when she bit my fingertips. She liked to touch me, like I was a phenomenon that never lost its novelty.

I begged her just once to make me beautiful, when I understood faerie magic but was not appropriately afraid of enchantment yet. “Every other child that’s still here has hair like golden wheat and eyes like summer sky.” I opened my eyes wide, in case she had forgotten that they were only as lovely as flint. “Can’t you glamour me? Please?”

Eiluned grinned. She said, “A stór, you are already much prettier than you could be. You have never seen a corpse, no? You are much prettier than any corpse, I promise.”

Eiluned had dragged me out of the sea the night it had dragged me out. I had been tempted to let it, for a minute, when I realized my parents had left me in their haste to leave the town. It was only when the water took my breath away that I discovered I would rather live. It was poor timing, as I was clawing at the pebbled ground beneath a wave as it wrenched me away toward the horizon. Then Eiluned had plucked me from the water and kissed my salty cheek and told me I was too charming to let drown. I had thought for a while that I was charming. I had later learned that she had mistaken me for a charm, or something the water offered up to her, and she had reached for me because she would never refuse a gift from the ocean.

“Maybe they would dislike me less,” I said. I had seen the work of glamours. I had seen the small, weak glamours that turned wildflower to roses and pebbles to diamonds, and I had seen the glamours that transformed fish into dragons and trees into towers. “Maybe I would be better suited to live with them if I looked differently.”

Eiluned regarded me for a moment. Sometimes I was fiercely reminded of the differences between faerie and human faces; I could not tell at all what she was thinking. “It is interesting that you consider yourself to be the one they dislike.”

Eiluned took me swimming in the sea much later. And later after that, a body washed up onto the shore. There had been some kind of accident; I could see bone where there should have been hair. The bone was the same colour as Eiluned’s hair. The faeries turned the body over and looked at its swollen face. Then they set to work digging.

Later that day, the rest of the disaster arrived. The faeries danced around the wreckage of the ship as the sea pushed it onto the sand. They pranced around the bodies that followed. They looked particularly wild, and toothful, like wolves or foxes, as they knocked heels and toes against waterlogged limbed and faces. I’d seen them dance before and I would have turned away except that they very quickly began to dig.

Eiluned was not among the diggers. She drifted away from them, up the sand, and found me. She was out of breath with excitement, for dancing never tired her. I watched over her shoulder as the faeries turned over wet sand, and then the deeper, heavier sand of the beach, with their fingers.

I could see the shapes and sizes of the holes before they were finished digging. I asked her, “Why are they burying the dead on the shore?”

Eiluned walked her fingertips across my shoulders. My neck prickled as if from the cold. “Those that die at sea must be buried at sea. Or else the sea comes to claim them. Would you like to help?”

I shook my head. “I don’t like to see them dead,” I said. I watched the faeries’ quick fingers. “I think they might bury me one day. One day I might die in the water, and you will not be here. They would love to bury me.”

Eiluned stroked my ear, then my collarbone, then the part in my hair. “They will not bury you here. The sea already tried to have you and it does not. It’s not your place to die. And they have no interest in burying you otherwise. Do not worry.”

She raked her nails across one of my shoulders as she spun away. She danced between the piles of sand and the holes in the sand and left me to watch the faeries pile the bodies beneath the sand. I wondered where the boat had come from and if anyone would come here looking for it. No humans had returned to the town since the faeries moved in, and I did not know if a ship full of men would be enough to endow the previous human inhabitants with the courage to return.

It was only a few days later when the faeries dug a new grave. It was inland, between an ash and a hazel tree. I made a chain of grasses strung through the tops of acorn cups as I watched. I tried to imagine being put inside such a grave. Even in my fantasy, in which I was a corpse, I possessed the sight to watched dirt fall all around me and turn my vision dark. I possessed the ability to feel the sensation of many small tubers and rocks and sediment on my skin. At night, when I could not stop seeing the yawning mouth of the grave, I woke. It would be several more hours before the men came. I shook off the dream and wiped the cobwebs from my mind. My fingernails were dirty, as though I’d been the one digging. I reached out and touched Eiluned’s hair. “Eiluned.”

She was never far from me at night, though I do not think she ever slept. Eiluned turned over, and as she did, several stars winked, and a bird flew out from beneath the tangle of her hair on the ground, and new birds swooped down to investigate the insides of her elbows. Eiluned shook them off and waved them away. She dipped her fingers in the dewy grass and sucked them clean. “Do you not need sleep anymore?” she asked, and tapped my face, under my eye. “If you are truly afraid of the water, we can sleep even farther from it.”

I could hear the tide, and though it sounded aggressive, I was not frightened. The beach was a ways away, and now it seemed to me the water would have an even harder time reaching us over the many graves that had been dug and filled. “I’m not afraid,” I said. “I have something for you. I wanted to give it to you.” I showed her the crown of acorns and grasses. It was irregular, but anything would sit well on her perfectly shaped head. The acorns would not get lost in her hair, which is what I had been afraid of.

Eiluned crooned as she seized the crown. She donned it and brushed the sleek blades of grass. She looked at her fingers after, as though they may be cut from it. She looked very well in the crown. “What good is wheat-golden hair and sky-blue eyes when none of them have such finery?” she said. “They will all envy me. If you make yourself one, they may envy you too.”

“Do not tease me,” I said, which was the same as telling her not to breathe. She smiled at my foolishness, before I stole the smile with my lips.

She still smiled. “I hope you have more sense than your kind. There is nowhere you can take me where I could be your wife. When I am not near the sea, I am not as you see me here. If you planned to leave. I cannot.”

“I don’t want to leave,” I replied. I wanted to kiss her again; kissing was too new so far to be frightened of it.

“Then you will not,” Eiluned said. She kissed me next, and now I knew that she tasted like salt, as salty as the sea.

The men came and were not quiet at all about it. Their horses’ hooves beat thunder into the ground. They passed the grave and rode close to the beach. “Are they looking for the wreck?” I whispered to Eiluned.

She said, “They are not looking for their men. They know exactly where they are.”

I stood up and followed the horsemen down the street. Somehow, none of them had fallen into the grave on the land. Eiluned walked even farther, toward the water, and a few faeries trailed after her. They did not seem to care about the horsemen. The horsemen looked familiar. I had been sure I did not remember any of the people that had once lived here with me, but perhaps I was wrong. One of them saw a pile of wet wood the faeries had dragged up from the sand and had been turning into animals and insects and anything else to interest them. He spoke loudly; every other man turned to him. His voice sounded to me like he was used to shouting over wind. “They are still here. But not for long. It is clear we are still meant to be here.”

Several of his companions cheered. They sounded too few to fight the faeries back, but they had iron in their armour and faces drawn by loss. They turned their horses around, with their backs to the water, and talked of their right to their own dead as they walked back into town.

Eiluned stepped onto the sand and fiddled with the acorn crown, which sat crookedly on her head. I stood in the surf to fix it for her and tried to ignore the faeries around me. “I will cherish this until I die,” Eiluned said, very seriously.

“Are they here to take back the town?” I asked.

“They do want it back,” Eiluned said. “But it is too late. It is ours.”

The horsemen stayed, somewhere in the town, while the faeries and Eiluned prepared. The faeries brought the children away from the shore, and up high. Other faeries went to help dig the hole in the ground, circling the horsemen, who were too blind to see they had been surrounded. The faeries took up a song, and it was not merry at all, not like many of their songs I had heard before. Though I had heard this song before. I had heard laments when the people left the town.

“A stór,” Eiluned said, stepping back into the water. It licked her knees, then the tops of her thighs. She could not feel it, though she looked like a bedraggled child, and should have been cold. The faeries half-circled her. Eiluned pulled me close and kissed and bit my fingertips. “They will listen to you. You must keep them between me and the sea.”

The faeries did not take me away while they drowned her. She did not fight, but they held her down anyway. It took much longer than it would take a human, but the sea filled her up. I followed the faeries as they circled the horsemen and put Eiluned into the grave in the earth. She blinked as they threw dirt on her, and I could think only of the cold, gritty sensation of it in her eyes.

I was filled with too much horror at first to hear the sea rumbling. Then, for the first time, a faerie touched me. I was shocked into looking at him, and listening.

“You must find high ground,” he said, as the ocean crept up the shore, searching for Eiluned.

I could hear the horsemen, between the growing waves and Eiluned’s grave. They were laughing, and they would until the ocean pulled them out with Eiluned.

“She is not yours anymore,” the faerie said. So I let Eiluned go to the sea.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Shanty Shanty Shanty

Organized religion can be a trap.

I’m mainly referring to Christianity, or Catholicism. Church-goers are consistent, and even though they don’t like the word “superstitious”, it isn’t so far from the word “devout”. Not in this case. If you were to blow a tsunami onto their shores and stop it when it spits on their front porch, they would call it a miracle and turn their thanks upward, instead of forward, to the sea that so benevolently did not steal their livelihood (or lives) from them.

I took control of this shantytown over three months ago, and I have hardly had to leave the beach since then. I’ve been admiring it from the shore for a few days now, with several fish flopping on the sand next to me. Or, they were flopping.

The shantytown was not a difficult place to liberate from its old owners (the residents). When I say shantytown, I mean there are several thousands of souls here, and hundreds more that tear through a part of it on the highway. There is almost no one tearing out of here, though. And despite the town’s small size, it took six days for news to reach from one end of the town to the other that I had seized it. And then there was not much for them to do.

There is a large house on the shore that belongs to a family that lives elsewhere. It was their summer home, and now it is my court. I believe in things like courts, the same way Christians believe in churches, but more political and less spiritual. There’s power in these walls, though there isn’t much else. It is more beautiful and daunting on the outside than on the inside, because the inside is saturated with the lived-in smell of old linens and pipe rust and carpets. I sit on the porch, facing the water, and rise when the humans come to speak to me, if only to make them believe that I have taken notice of their interruption, and I have no intention of this conversation interrupting me more than it must. Really, the interruption is somewhat welcome, because otherwise I walk indoors and then out the other side, and sit beneath the beech tree and inspect the changes in my legs (new freckles, new hairs, the way muscles shift around bones when I move them).

It isn’t a superpower, what I do. My colleagues (acquaintances, family, kin, etc.) all shoulder the burden of this same super power. They must see it as a burden, because there are hardly any recent story about our clever ways. Our charms, our glamours. There are ways to look human, one of my kin once told me, quietly and fervently, like it was a secret, something superior and forbidden and tantalizing. Then everyone was doing it, and suddenly it lost its appeal, apparently. We have charmed children to look like tree branches and tubers and large vegetables. Some of us- not my kind specifically- have traded them and made off with the children. My kind just decided to start leaving their skins about everywhere. It was all a planned sort of laziness. A trap that required nothing more than a shucking off of clothing. Then luring others to it. We did it so efficiently, so unthinkingly, that I imagine we were something like smart children in a boring environment. Learning to adapt, condensing into adulthood. But ability fades without use. If most of them were to try to stretch that muscle now, they would achieve nothing but snapping it.

The glamour is nothing more than a safety precaution. If humans were to see us with their children in hand often, there would be some problems. It is better by far to hand over a piece of driftwood made up to look like a drowned child than to offer up a drowned child. There are only so many children in this shantytown, anyway, and humans being sent to talk and negotiate would notice a sudden decline of the one generation keeping them going. So it is branches and sticks of wood and pieces of tarp that become a part of the ruse. A way to smooth the edges, and pave and sand the streets. A few days later, when the children (or beautiful wives or handsome husbands or sickly parents or lovers) are back to being bits of driftwood and nothing more, there must be some relieved exclamations. Yet I’ve never been called upon to explain myself.

I only know it has been enough to secure this shantytown, and it is the superstitious, religious folk that would build me an altar and sacrifice everything but their firstborn to keep me appeased.

Some of them put crosses on their doors too, to no effect. It was a fun couple of days, listening to them hammer away.

The first of the negotiators came within two weeks. Sent by some power of the United States. Homeland Security, of the FBI, or some other waste of taxes. Citizens of the United States had much better options, but this was what they gave me. A twitching, often young, member of the shantytown, stumbling over their words as they asked what it was I wanted or needed, to keep them and the town safe. I had a hell of a time telling them that there was nothing Homeland or the FBI or the President of the United States himself could offer that would appease me. I would disappear into the beachside house and come out the other side, steal a twig from the beech tree, and between the front door and the back door I would make it appear like the arm of a child. I screamed once, for good measure. And broke some glass once, just for the illusion. This is not something that my kin would do- this is not part of being clever. This is what comes, I suppose, of being the only one up here, the only one on the sand rather than in the waves. Eventually, the loneliness is enough to make you a little dramatic.

The negotiator would leave, and I would sit on the porch and look at the waves and think that this was a stupid shore to have washed up on, and if I could choose again, I’d go the long way round and do to the west coast, or I’d cross all the way back to my people’s first home. There was better music there, I heard, and even more superstition, of the old-but-not-Christian variety.

It’s been nearly five months now. The fish keep tumbling onto the sand and dying, which isn’t normal. Members of the shantytown bring me food I don’t care to eat, and wine I don’t care to drink. None of them bring the one thing that could stop me, because only one person has it. I don’t know who it is, and if they never return here, then I will never return to the waves. So it’s all on the humans, really. One human. Until that day, if it comes at all, I’ll remain here, and the humans will have as little choice as I do to deal with it.

There were other efforts made, before now, to evict me from the shantytown by force. But present a SWAT team with some glamoured pieces of flotsam and jetsam, some crosses charmed to look like the bodies of children or beautiful women (always women and children, they all want to save the vulnerable ones) and the SWAT team begins to sweat beneath their fatigues. If I’m stuck in a stalemate, waiting for one of their kind, then they can be stuck in a stalemate as well, waiting for me to leave or do whatever I will with this town.

Of course, eventually someone will realize that the bodies I send out are unidentifiable, and that I’ve exceeded the population of this town with my body count, or that the town has not actually decreased in size despite the growing body count, and then I might have to do some creative truth telling. But on that day, if things continue in this boring way, I might just be happy to face the challenge. My kin always said I wasn’t good at being idle. None of us are.

I’ve reached five months and the beach smells of rotting fish. I hear a car approach and watch it around the side of the house. The person standing on the asphalt is no one I know, but I don’t need to know her to recognize her. She is a negotiator, donning the neon vest that makes all negotiators look like perhaps they are planning to direct air traffic. She also carries something in her arms, and it looks like a sweater, which is odd on such a warm day.

“Fuck,” I say, when she comes closer, and I can see that in her arms it is no sweater. It makes me smile, and it makes me relieved, and it makes me feel that I’ve lost the game. I doubt They (They being the people behind these machinations, behind sending her, the FBI or Homeland Security or whoever it is) knew what they were doing when they sent her, or knew just how equipped she is to send me away.

Because she has my skin folded in her arms.

I wait on the sand, because I may as well be close to the waves, in case the unlikely does happen.

“Please wipe your feet on the mat before entering,” I say when she finds the back porch.

She looks at the grainy, wet sand on the beach, and the grainy, wet sand on the porch, and then the grainy, wet sand on her feet. She’s younger, but quite pretty. Could be worse. “What is really going on here?” she asks.

I say, “I’ve taken over the town.”

She hoists my skin up in her arms. She doesn’t even seem to realize it’s there, but she must. She says, “Why this town? What are you doing here? We’ve never had this kind of trouble before. Why didn’t you take it somewhere else, like, somewhere bigger or something? You’re afraid of being found out, aren’t you.”

Perhaps They had chosen her because of her intellect, and not because of extreme fortune in coming across my skin. I would never again just leave it out to dry on a rock, I decided. “I’m afraid of nothing. Haven’t you heard? I’m a killer and scoundrel. I’m here to stay, unless, the obvious were to happen.”

“Or unless I just take you away right now. What’s the stop me from just carting this away from the ocean and making you follow me?” She shakes the skin a little, to taunt me or to frighten me.

“My charm.” I flick my fingers and the wave behind me jumps. If she is so smart, she should know that it’s we that have stopped the sea from swallowing this town, on occasion. “My dashing good looks. My personality. Or the fact that you owe me. Don’t you?”

“I’ve never made a deal with you,” she says, because apparently she truly is that smart.

“I know that. But don’t you believe in having a little gratitude?” She doesn’t say a thing, or give up my skin. “If I were another thing, I could convince you to dance with me until your feet grind down to nubs and your bones turn to dust and everyone you love is dead.”

She grimaces, like I’ve just shown her a picture of the outcome. “I’m not really a dancer. I’d say no. And you can’t do that, so.”

I make the waves jump a little higher, and crash on the sand, over my feet and right up to hers. “I could take your firstborn and leave you with another and you wouldn’t notice until one day you had a child that couldn’t lie or travel across water or stand the smell of human blood.”

“That’s unoriginal,” she says. “Try again.”

I nudge a dead fish with my foot. There are fewer right now than there were a minute ago. The waves I called have taken some of them out. “I could make you a lady among my people. There are humans that would die for that opportunity, you know.”

She smiles into my skin. I could almost smile myself, which is when I realize that it will have been the first time I’ve smiled in over forty days. I can almost feel her smile pressed into my skin. It is right there, in front of my, and the ocean is right there, behind me.

“A lady,” she says. The waves crash behind me, through no work of my own. “As tempting as that sounds, I don’t want to see what your home is like, if this is what you’ve done to my town.”

“I’ve been bored,” I say. “My home is nothing like this. You’d be the only one to have seen it for dozens of years. What do you say to that?”

“What difference would that make? Would it stop you from doing this again?”

I smile. “What would stop me from doing this again is in your arms, but you don’t seem to want to give it up. If you come along with it, then we’ll both be happier. Or leave yourself behind, and I’ll make sure we remember your generosity.”

She looks down, where silvery fish bodies are being rolled by the froth and the brine into the waves. The beach looks like rippling, living metal. She says, “I know you can’t lie, but I’m sure you’re not telling the full truth.”

“I’d tell it if you asked for it,” I say. “You’re the human one here.”

More fish roll into the sea. One hits my ankle and stays there on the sand, staring up at me. The vitreous humour dried out a while ago, so it’s nothing but a dark socket and some scales. I can already tell where this is headed, because she’s human and I’ve been around them for months now, and for years before that. “You sound pretty human yourself,” she replies. “You look it too, without this on. I think you’re hardly something else anymore. There’s almost no point.”

I hope my kin push back and drown this town.

“I’m going to hold onto this for a while, just so you can’t do this again,” she says, turning away with my skin in her hands. Now that I’ve seen it again, I cannot easily let it out of my sight. “No more dead bodies. That’s the first rule.”

She leads me around to the front, past the beech tree, and if she hears the sea start to toss, she doesn’t say anything. I have no choice but to watch her keep the skin on her lap as she drives me into the police station, accompanied by applause from half the town.

Their clapping sounds almost like the tide coming in.

Art by Anna Dittmann

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Victims

One would think that there were something in my past, or my genetic make up, to indicate exactly what I’d do. But there was nothing. I was born a nobody, to a family that had no more respect for the Good Ones than most. Another white family that didn’t care about its Irish or Scottish roots, only that West Virginia voted right in the upcoming election. I lived hours away from city, and I use the term city loosely, because what city meant to us was that there was a movie theatre with more than two people working in it, and more than one Starbucks. Where I came from, people passed around stories about torrential rain blowing off roofs, or deer jumping tragically in front of bumpers, or having to chase goats away from the tractor innards on the lawn.

I came from dirt and I looked like it. My family is coloured like the land we live on, all brown and forgettable. I only thought West Virginia was beautiful when I got out of it. Up and took myself to Chicago, where the red brick buildings covered in so many fire escapes like parasites made me realize that you didn’t find that amount of green just anywhere outside of West Virginia. I didn’t regret it, and my family was proud to have me gone. I was always different, they started to tell me in letters and over the phone, only after I’d left. When I was in elementary school, bored waiting for the hot lunch program to fill me, I played games of checkers on a board made of salt and sugar packets, which I stuffed in my pockets for later. I never jumped at loud noises in the hedges, and whatever might have gotten caught in there, I gently hitched out of the brambles and set free. I was the only one to see what the crazy woman (Hilly- short for Hilda or Hillary, no one knew) saw, or to say I did, and steer her away from the strange creatures. I used to put out small ramekins of milk at night, for cats or ghosts I used to say. In return, mother said, nothing in the garden, and nothing in the fields, ever grew poorly or struggled, even through a particularly short season. I never lied, not even when a couple of short skirts in high school accused me of getting them drunk and figuring out for myself what was under those short skirts. I planted a mountain ash tree outside the house of a neighbour who had woken up with her hair in many knots, as deliberate as a sailor’s, as though someone had done it in the night. How grateful she was, my mother said, for the mountain ash, and how generous it was of her to gift me the money I used to buy my way to Chicago.

I bought the apartment, by the way. Not the ride. I rode in the back of the truck that came once a week to stock the convenience section of the gas station on the edge of our dust town.

Chicago wasn’t my first stop, actually. It was the last of many stops. I made stops in Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, down to Louisville, up to Milwaukee, and down again. I realized, over the trip, exactly how I related to people. It wasn’t something you always knew from living in a small town, but you got to know it fast when you moved around. Mostly, I got to know victims. I could pick them out in a crowd, whether I was trying to or not, and once I did, they flocked, like they sensed I could help them. It was like a buzzard’s love song, coming to me at once. I never wanted for a girlfriend.

I had a knack for picking them out, but they were really the ones that picked me.

In Columbus, Alina became sick to her stomach after drinking some sweet beer with a few boys in the park. She stuttered over her explanation, like I would be upset with her for spending time with other men. By the time she’d calmed down and had the tea I made for her from rose hips and salt, her stomach was right as rain, and she knew never to accept strange drinks from pretty boys again. She broke up with me two weeks later.

Gloria of Cincinnati loved to dance. She thought herself most beautiful when she was in the thrashing mass of people in a Latin club, and she had no reservations about who she danced with. We met and got together when she taught me how to meringue. We lasted as long as it took her to dance with someone else, which had happened before. She didn’t stop dancing, which hadn’t happened before. When I sprinkled some soil beneath her feet and took her one hand that wasn’t occupied by a man I refused to make eye contact with, and when I led her on a path of soil to the outdoors, and when I piggybacked her home because human legs aren’t meant to be used after four consecutive days of dancing, she learned that you can’t dance wherever you fancy. When I left Cincinnati, she was looking to open her own club on her family’s property. She had a steep learning curve.

There was one in every town, and not much variation: Elizabeth in Indianapolis who plucked an apple from a neighbour’s yard without asking dumped me three days after I plucked a poisoned splinter from the inside of her lip. Louisville Nuala jokingly traded her annoying baby sister for a face free from pimples, and found the crib empty and the window open when she went home that night. I gave her some SpectroGel, found her sister alive, unharmed, and only slightly dirty under a mound of soil in the ravine, and brought her back to her nursery, newly anointed at the windows and door with salt. The next weekend, Nuala and I were over. Milwaukee was no better. I didn’t mind teaching the lessons, though I could have done without the breakups. When I worked my way back up north, finally with a destination in mind, I swore off girlfriends, and swore instead on my talent.

Chicago is much better than it once was, but there are neighbourhoods still where it’s unwise to walk with earphones in, with your eyes down, with your head up, with your heels on and your brain still stewing in alcohol. Because those are the easiest to get, and mostly, it’s girls. The girls who aren’t in school, aren’t sober, aren’t at home every night, aren’t at home any nights, aren’t sure how to make a fist, aren’t above accepting a handout. It’s hard to turn some of them away, but I feel that, in the interest of keeping my life the way it is, I’d best skirt any police interference, or neighbourly interference, that comes with dating anyone below the age of consent. All the young ones just better wait a while before they make a hot and vulnerable mess of themselves.

We date. There are actual dates, with romance and everything. Then the work starts, because inevitably they all make Little Red Riding Hoods of themselves, talking to people and walking places they shouldn’t. Some of them are street smart, and even them, you can hardly imagine what stupid things they do. They accept strange gifts, strange invitations, take detours, hold hands, make promises. But they all come to me when they make a mistake. Unlike the maniac with the ax, I don’t command their eternal gratitude, or their loyalty. Once they’ve been freed of their own consequences and their lessons learned, they cast themselves off, hardly ever lasting more than a couple weeks. It isn’t the girls that are thankful, but I do get the occasional client that I haven’t dated, in need of a handful of salt, or to take a walk over running water, and they’re always pleased with my services.

I was visited by a police officer that had apparently seen two young women, and a young boy with his distraught mother and a black river tracing of veins in his neck, enter my apartment all in one week. The officer – a lethargic lump of a man with more hairs in his moustache than working neurons in his brain- asked to see the inside of my apartment, then asked some questions about what I was doing in Chicago (living), and where I worked (here, on my laptop) and who those girls were (friends), before he seemed to realize that there wasn’t much else to discover. He couldn’t see what I was doing in a day beside making lunch on the stove and listening to the radio quietly and being generally happy alone. He met my newest girlfriend on the way out, and because she hadn’t been victimized yet, and smiled, the officer didn’t come back.

Not yet, anyway. There’s always time for mistakes, the sort only I know how to fix.

That girlfriend lasted three more weeks. I haven’t dated anyone since, though there have been girls.

There have been girls and now there is Tate Shuter. In her face I can see that she has all kinds of street smarts. She has the accumulated street smarts of possibly every girl I’ve ever dated, and she’s never once considered putting any of that intellectual energy into school. She works at one of the bars I frequent, where Ava, who works with her, tells me she’s capricious and unfriendly. Tate walks home late, alone, and gets into shouting arguments with strangers on the street. She mouths off to anyone before she knows them. If someone leaves their wallet behind, there’s a good chance Tate will rummage through it before they’ve even had the chance to notice it’s missing and call the bar. She takes stupid risks, is what a lot of this amounts to, but I’ve known girls who take stupid risks smartly, and that’s Tate. It isn’t a problem, except that she’s now met me.

I knew the moment I first saw her that she would need my help eventually. Not for the fighting or the raising a fist, but when she finally ticks off the wrong person. They won’t get her with a backhand or a broken bottle, and she doesn’t know how to fix an argument she can’t fight her way out of. Ava keeps telling me what she knows about Tate, and I can see she thinks that I’ve chosen Tate, already. Tate never lies, because she never thinks she’s done anything wrong. That’s a cry for help, but she’s not really asking for it. Tate puts out milk for some cats she thinks lives in the alley, even though no one’s ever seen one. Tate climbed into the bushes beside the turnpike outside of the city proper because she heard a sound like an animal fighting, even though it could have been two hobos fighting or doing something else. Tate will get herself into trouble, I think, but I don’t quite want to help her. I want to prevent whatever it is I’ll treat her for, and we can live in my apartment with salt on the windowsills and we can buy an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, because I can tell that must be an aspiration for her. And we can put out milk at night and never try to figure out what drinks it, and watch the strawberries in our garden grow and blossom no matter the weather, because I can tell it’s something that would please both of us.

Tate catches me watching her stack glasses and says, “Don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I already know that.”

I say, “I wasn’t about to tell you that.” Though I want to say “here are all the other ways you can be careful, so I never have to help you.”

But I know I will, so I let it slide.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay