Heavier Wings

Graveyards had nothing to do with it. It was rain. Rain and petrichor. The smell of damp loam, and the green, growing scent that rose off anything green and growing in any graveyard. She had been in a graveyard on the other side of the world the other day, where the petrichor smelled like bamboo, as pungent as if she were pressing her nose against it, and the rain was sharp and warm. Here everything was misty and silver-tipped, like the world emerging from a storm. There’s Spanish moss, crawling like a dark cloud over several of the graves.

That did more to call them than the graveyard. Graveyards are nothing but vehicles for human superstition. She liked graveyards, but she liked the sullen darkness of them, or the grayness of them, the quiet, all of those things humans liked but only for so long before a part of them- the living part, she often thought- cried out for an end to solitude. She kept her ears strained for the sounds, the ones humans never heard, the wailing that following the waking, like a child’s cry after it is banished from the womb. The nails scratching against the inside of the coffin, savage, then cautious when wood chips and polish chips gathered beneath the nails, then savage again when air began to get thin. Not that air was a priority, but the bodies had the physical imprint of life, the memory of breathing, and that was almost the same thing as the need for it, apparently.

She might have helped them, but she liked the waiting time, to prepare something to say. It was not necessary. Most days she had nothing to say to those that rose. She only had to do her job, and that did not require kindness. She just had to do… what needed to be done. She watched tulips bobbing on the wind, the colours of embers in a fireplace, and some the colour of brambleberry jelly, dark and rich and sweet.

The scratching stopped for a while. She was getting used to that too. They start and stop, start and stop, as if they were wakng and could not keep their eyes open, drifting in and out of sleep. The graves are silent, then a riot, all at once. She stayed quiet. She let her pale, bare back take the brunt of the sunlight, until she felt she might blister from the heat. She looked at the red lichen growing on top of the tombstone, between her toes. She curled her toes over the edge of the tombstone, though she had never fallen, and wasn’t worried about doing it now. She watched passersby, tourists and the dailies, the ones who visited their loved ones each afternoon or night or pocket of the day they had carved out for the memory of the deceased. They reminded her of the colours of a greenhouse, once one had gotten past the algae-tinted water and the banana leaves and golden barrel cacti and it was all berry-red blossoms on vines, and purple flower slike upside down umbrellas curving around the stalks of birds of paradise. Quite pretty, but a little garish together, so different. At least they took in the graveyard, the despairing angels atop tombs, the subtle and solemn engravings on the plates set into the ground, before they raised their digital cameras.

She was not in the photography, even the camera that pointed at the grave next to her, or the mausoleum behind her. She was not a grave one saw, or a statue one ogled.

Evening began to fall, a dark blue curtain that rippled with black like ink in the ocean. Rainwater ran off the trees, ran off her wings, cleaned some of the mud from the barbs of her feathers.

The scratching came again. She heard the vicious tear of teeth, which meant that whoever was in the grave was getting very desperate. Their bones were hitching together, their shoulders rolling back and colliding against one another.

She closedher eyes. She could feel the soil above the grave begin to part, as if the fingers parting it were not so much clawing for freedom, as carting through her hair, making her scalp tingle. She reached outside her own flesh to the fingers in the dirt and willed the grave’s occupant, up. She wondered if the person climbing toward her was even aware of her thoughts, of her mental reach. She had not been aware of any intrusions in her mind when she’d climbed out of her own grave, but that might have been for lack of trying, on both their ends.

She held out her hand, over the grave. She pushed aside the night air as if it were a blanket, listening, stretching, sniffing the air, the petrichor, changing with the disturbed loam.

She opened her eyes again, looking right at the occupant of the grave. Former occupant. She had expected a girl. Girls, especially ones that died as young as this boy had died- nine, or ten- appeared more often than young boys did. Younger and younger women were getting restless in their graves, not long as they were buried.

The boy’s face was soft still, like rising dough, not yet sharpened into distinguishable features. He wore the suit he’d been buried in, covered in grave dirt. His spine was rigid, and he held himself carefully sideways, as if some injury from when he’d lived hurt him still. That happened sometimes, like phantom limb syndrome. Phantom life syndrome. He huddled against the headstone, but pressed a hand to it, as though he’d stopped in the middle of pushing it away. Or pushing away from her.

Insitnctively, she turned her ear toward him. Her good ear. Injuries were not fixed in death. She heard his loud breaths in her left ear as if he’d stepped closer.

The boy pushed himself to his knees, bu didn’t stand. There was something strange about his chest, an indent, as if, while being formed, someone had left him to dry over a metal beam, and his body had bent around it. There was a dark mark on his cheek too, not a bruise, like a caved in skull. He looked at her wings carefully. There was a cross on a chain around his neck. Perhaps he believed creatures with wings were angels. “Where is my mama?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She inspected the boy’s nails. They were cracked, dirt crowded under them.

“I want to go home,” he said, voice muffled by tears.

“This is home, now.” Her voice- she so rarely used it, she forgot how it sounded- was dry, like the husk of an insect. The abandoned carapace of a beetle. “You must forget any other. This is it.” The words were not as useless as she’d once thought they were. People accepted this and took to it all with alacrity. Those that didn’t found themselves a place to haunt, a place to roam, things to touch or cling to, pools of water or mirrors to inhabit. They were not haunting. Only haunted by the memories of what it was like to inhale. To touch and feel heat. To cling or clutch or break or bend.

She wanted to send him back into the coffin. She wanted to close his eyelids and preserve him, trap him like a memory trapped in perfume. Take something from him and bottle it. She wanted to hide him in the dirt. She felt as if the dirt wanted him. The others were restless, and yet he was the first one, the first to wake.

She reached out, her fingers hovering over his hair. She could push it back, see if he felt what she had when he’d climbed out of his grave. She imagined hat fair hair, cut at the barber’s, then concealed beneath a hat until it had grown out of it, tilted as he ducked and looked at his hands, which were long enough to splay across an octave on a piano. Not large enough yet to touch someone else, the way he didn’t understand yet.

The boy looked up. His lip had stopped quivering. If he’d been about to cry before, he wasn’t about to do it now. There was mud on the hems of his pants, in his shirt sleeves. She’d hardly ever seen children crawl out of their own grave.

She dropped her legs on either side of the tombstone, opening her arms, as if she had grown a part of the statue, flat and waiting for a reception. But the boy did not need prompting. He came forward, pressing his cheek against her collar, then curling his hands together under her breastbone. She touched him with her hands, her hands that put him in his grave and summoned him again.

The boy had many memories, but they were already fading. Peace was such a savage thing, that swallowed memories of fights, and therefore memories of the times before, the times after, the silences, the tension, and the relief, the fondness. It swallowed memory after memory, in time. She held onto him, trying to keep peace from him while he figured out how to wrap his arms around her without rustling her wings.

Art by Lucie MacAulay

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Evidence

The story of my dream is like this: when I was seven I dreamt a man with grey eyes. Grey is an inconspicuous colour; the colour of the sky on a day when no one notices it. But his eyes are grey in a hollow way that catches your attention. A way that is so placid it’s violent. Like a declaration; not of a war that’s about to be fought, but a death that’s already occurred.

Looking into his eyes was like being eaten alive, and that was before he moved.

The first time is foggy. I thought, because it was the first dream of him, that I would remember it. But since then, the long list of dreams containing the grey-eyed man has coiled in on itself and it’s impossible to tell one nightmare from another.

I’ve had dozens, or hundreds of these dreams. In them he holds down my wrists and cuts them, or presses his thumbs into my throat until I forget what it is to breathe. I wake feeling as though I’ve been stabbed in the chest.

I remember when I had fewer dreams. When I moved to Oxford, I was convinced that I’d left him behind. I did not dream about him the first night. Nor the second or third. For two weeks he was not in my dreams at all. England has a perpetually grey sky, but this didn’t bother me.

I kitted out the apartment with things that suited me; new/old bookcases from vintage shops and roadside trades. I filled them with my books, then got a new mattress to celebrate the two best weeks of sleep I’d had in a while. I got a coffee every morning for a week at the café two blocks away, so the baristas came to recognize me and remembered my regular order. They smiled as if it were a secret we shared. I tipped generously.

On my fifteenth day in Oxford, he appears in my dreams. He kneels on my back, a rope wraps around his hands, pulled taught between them. He puts the rope under my neck and wraps it around, squeezing and lifting so I look toward the sky. I know I must be dreaming; I’ve always been lucid while this happens. But knowing that I’m dreaming doesn’t chase away the terror, does not make my heart beat more slowly when I wake.

I’m not a stupid person. I know about lucid dreaming, about night terrors and sleep paralysis and anxiety disorders. I know that the feeling of being unable to breathe isn’t real, because if it were, my body would wake me up immediately so I could do something about it. But they are long minutes, the ones between the grey-eyed man appearing, and my breathing reflex stopping in the dream.

I have no routine when I wake up. Some nights are worse than others. That morning, after the first dream, I check my neck in the bathroom mirror for a red line. It is my greatest fear, that I would never admit to anyone. That I would see some evidence of the grey-eyed man’s actions. Proof that he exists in the same world as me.

The students live in what they call the Oxford bubble. They do seem contained to their lives within the residences, colleges, and library. Oxford itself seems to exits in a bubble. It is old and, when the grey sky presses down with the promise of rain, it feels isolated from the rest of the world. It is comforting when one runs to the café with bags under one’s eyes, every morning. Oxford never changes. It is one of my favourite things about the place. I hoped to make it permanent, when I first moved. Permanency was a tricky thing. The idea of it was impermanent.

This night, when I open my eyes, he’s at the foot of my bed, where a dog would be. He’s watching me, as though he has been for ages. His grey eyes are the most startling thing in the room. Even his shape seems more frightening than any black shadow. Without raising a hand, he reminds me of claws. Not a creature with claws, but claws themselves, and the way they curve, like beckoning fingers, like hooks, pulling you in.

I can’t take my eyes off him. I’ve never been able to. My heartbeat drowns out all other noise until he moves. He comes to the side of my bed and straddles me. I can feel the heat of his body as he leans over me and puts his hands around my neck, pressing his thumbs into my windpipes. I could draw marks on my own neck in exactly the shape of his thumbs. He begins to squeeze.

Light flashes through the room as a car goes by outside. There’s a digital clock in the living room. I can’t make out the hour, but the last two red numbers are 57. His thumbs press a little harder, and a bubble of air gets trapped in my throat. The last of my air. When the last air is gone, there’s no more. As though the world has filled with water. I can’t breathe. I can’t

The next morning, I don’t get coffee. I walk and walk until I find a bookstore. I buy enough to fill the last two shelves in one of my recently acquired bookcases. I buy lunch and eat it in Oxford University Parks. I buy produce for dinner, a loaf of bread, butter, and jam. I go home and put the produce away. I’ll use it another day. I make my toast and scrape butter and jam over it. When crumbs get stuck in my throat, I wash them down quickly with white wine.

I’m not sure when I fall asleep on my couch. Sleep creeps up slowly, but then it is right behind you. It has you before you can see it. A crafty thief or assassin. It brings with it the grey-eyed mad.

This time he has a washcloth. He puts it over my mouth and think that this time he means to suffocate me, like he once did with a pillow. But for a moment I lie on my sofa, with a cloth over my face, blind and smelling the clean cotton smell of the cloth.

Then he pours water on my face. It’s as if the world has filled with water. There is nowhere to turn where I won’t inhale water. My lungs begin to splinter as oxygen abandons them. My brain turns to mush, and spasms all at once. Every bit of me tingles like pins and needles. I reach up to claw at him. I’ve never touched him before. I scratch his skin. It feels like normal skin. My hand comes away wet.

In the morning, my body is heavy as iron, my eyelids feel like lead. I force myself to get up. I’ll leave Oxford soon, and I’ll try to leave the grey-eyed man behind with it. I put off going to the bathroom, but I do it eventually.

I don’t know what kind of marks drowning would leave. I don’t feel anything sloshing around in my lungs (not that I would know what that feels like), and my mouth is dry. I look at my cheek. There is a long red cut, as though I’ve run a knife across it.

I look at my nails. There is blood under them. I wash my hands. Then my face.

I wash and wash until there is hardly any evidence.

Art by Kira

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Time Not Looking

Leslie never looked at me wrong. As the lesser-twenties-year-old friend of my brother, this was not a surprise. It was unlikely that my brother had ever told him that I was “off the menu”, but Leslie never went there. We weren’t like that to one another. We were hardly even friends. It didn’t matter that I knew almost everything about him, and that I’d catalogued it in my brain (which catalogued most things, whether I wanted it to or not). I also had my own best friend’s birthday memorized. Her favourite food. Her idiosyncrasies. May 16. Sweet potato tempura. She has an innate and extreme sympathy for lobsters.

But I doubt Leslie knows that much about me, and I never put any effort into knowing that much about him. It never matters, because he doesn’t look at me like that.

Which is why, when we got off the ferry on Kerry, and Leslie turned to help me down, not to take my bag or one of the others’ bags, it took me a very long moment to reply. In that long moment his face didn’t change. Sometimes he could be so still it was like he’d grown out of the landscape around him. Like he was a part of the moss and rock under his shoes.

He gripped my elbow, because it was close to him and because I was born all angles, and I’ve grown into even more angles. The knobs of my elbow give a person perfect indents to dig their fingers into. I’m light. I’m practically made for hauling around. Or for helping down off a ferry.

His fingers were solid on my elbow. He wore a ring on his right hand, his non-dominant hand. He almost never took it off. I felt it pressed into my skin now, as warm as his skin, and, strangely, almost as soft, as if it weren’t even there.

Leslie had met me in the same year as he’d met my brother, but, in the way that people do when they’re making a new friend, he had only eyes for his new friend. I was a wave, or a nod, not even an afterthought, for several months. I was Travis’ little sister to the world, and not sure what that made me to Leslie, except maybe Travis’ little sister. I didn’t even know if there was an adjective thrown in there. Travis’ annoying little sister. Precocious little sister. Maybe he forgot Travis had a little sister. I was twelve when they first met. Now a senior in university, I’d had plenty of years to evolve into a grey area. Not a friend, but more than an acquaintance. A carved banister in the architecture of his relationship with my brother. Not a function, but a presence.

Leslie let me lean into him, and took a single step back. In that way that one can see accidents coming, I could see immediately that the distance between myself and his back foot was not enough to stop me from bumping his shoulder with mine when I descended. I could see the shoulder I was going to hit, just touched by sunlight, covered in his soft maroon tee shirt. It had been cloudy, and raining earlier, and his shirt had somehow dried, but there were wrinkles in the sleeves where he’d wrung it out.

The others came behind me, with suitcases and equipment for the shows. When you start in a band, you bring your own equipment. You save up with your friends and look for cheap used stuff- good quality – on the web, and buy it off people who can only meet you at the border. Then you pray to God that you don’t leave anything behind while you’re packing it all, tight as Tetris, in the back of your van. The others had written checklists, while I only had a mental one, kept sharp and up-to-date only by my anxiety. I could never relax; I was either an inch from panicking, or so unbothered I was comatose. Part of why my brother had first been against me touring with them, even if I did play and could replace any one of them were they to get too drunk or sick to make a show. Leslie had stood up, physically, quietly, and that was almost all he needed to do. My brother was one of the few people who could argue with him, but not for long.

I’d come simply to escape school. I followed the music, but I knew that this was my brother’s music. This was in my brother’s bones, and though it made mine hum, it always left me feeling bereft. I never mentioned it to my brother. I have time, I kept saying to myself. Time for music. I played with Leslie my brother and the band, or kept an eye on their stuff while they played. I did what I was doing now; loaded and unloaded equipment and bags on and off ferries. Of course, I had help. Right now, Leslie’s hand under my elbow was supporting half my weight as I dropped unsteadily to the ground.

Our shoulders bumped. And more than that. My side brushed his ribs. My hair whispered against his bicep. I was aware of every way that I was touching him, in case he wanted me to pull away. Because Leslie and I did not do this. He still held my elbow, as tightly as though I were falling, though I was completely steady on my feet.

I’d gotten used to watching them play, or finding another way to amuse myself while they played. A way that didn’t involve getting hit on, or drowning myself with guinness. As long as I was back for the last set. I got the occasional comment about how inappropriate it was that I travelled with my brother and his band of vagabonds, but none that apparently made this assumption based on more than a cursory glance at our lifestyle form the corner of a pub. The first time such a remark was made to me in front of the others, I tried to scoff, lost my nerve, and turned away until the offended left of his own accord. The others looker neither impressed, nor unimpressed. Now I could scoff or, if I was feeling particularly contrary, I could turn it into an argument, and continue until the other party left, feeling assaulted and stunned.

Leslie held my elbow when I stepped back. His fingers hooked themselves in the knobbly geometry of my elbow. His breath on my ear was faint as the touch of a bug. I had to resist the urge to scratch my ear. The warmth of his breath stirred the hair at my temple. I had the thought that he was going to kiss me, and I did not know how to feel. This was Leslie. And we were never interested.

I held his gaze. More out of fear than anything. I was caught. I’d looked straight into his face before, hadn’t I? But the more I stared, the more I thought of all the time I spent not looking at Leslie, or thinking of him, the more I was convinced that I hadn’t ever seen him that way. I felt a couple of the others looking at us now. If I stepped away, we can pretend this never happened.

Leslie tugged me a few feet from the ferry, out of the others’ way. His hand is still on my elbow. He wasn’t looking at me any certain way. But it could be, absolutely, no wrong way. The thing is: he’s never looked at me that way. Never looked at me. I try not to tell myself that it means something.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Fake Eden

When she saw Aidan again, leaning on his car, his posture so perfectly slanted that she knew he’d been waiting in that exact position for her to exit her work and see him, she gave so many damns at once her heart felt bruised.

“True or false,” he said. His voice was high and low, rumbling and full of starlight. “You are surprised and delighted to see me?”

Things cracked at the edges. Truthfully, she hadn’t seen him for years. Decades. She’d spent two of those decades in the same place before realizing that even in ten years, if you didn’t physically age, people gave you an odd look. She’d been in Memphis, then Portland, then a number of small towns in Canada, and finally she had settled in San Francisco. The weather was nice, and she had orange juice every morning. No one questioned her ageless face, because so many people wanted one. That was the magic of Los Angeles, she realized. Everyone within it or without wanted it to be Eden, so much so that they wouldn’t recognize a God if they saw one.

No one recognized Gods. The attention Aidan attracted probably had more to do with his pretty face and his vitality.

She lifted her bag onto her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” She checked to make sure that she’d left work at the right time, that the sky was still above them and hadn’t fallen down, and that it wasn’t snowing. No, there was only one impossible thing happening right now.

“It is possible,” he began, “That I’m considering a natural disaster.”

“In California?” she said. “They’re already experiencing a water shortage.”

Aidan stepped forward. “Maybe a flood, then.” He opened his arms and though he didn’t move quickly, shock sped his movements. Time lapsed between the moment Aidan was in front of her, at arm's length, and the moment his arms were already around her, her face pressed into the sleeve of his bamboo shirt.

Synapses in her brain died. She forced her surroundings to come into focus. She stood and waited for the hug to finish. It did not, for a long time. “How did you get here?”

“Plane. I got into LAX two hours ago. Are you hungry?”

“Am I- Hungry? I don’t know. I guess.”

His smiled stretched. There was little of his face that wasn’t taken up with it. It was a little dazzling. A man walking past them stumbled over his own feet.

“Stop that,” she said.

Aidan’s smile wilted slightly, but his energy did not. “I know a place to eat.”

That was amazing, because she didn’t. Two years in San Francisco and she’d never been to the same restaurant twice. It took three visits or her to remember a single place. She’d thought that San Francisco would suit her. It did, more than any other city, but indoors, crowds, people, noise- none of those suited her. She wasn’t sure there was a way to isolate herself from any of those without becoming a hermit. This is it. This is what humans do. This is life.

“Is this your car?” she asked. It looked like a Mustang. One thing she’d come to be enthusiastic about was cars. It was something about the speed and the technological advancement. She was sure that’s what being human was all about. Riding in a vehicle that ran on transient resources. Being in a car was like touching mortality.

“I got it in Virginia. There are some nice races down there. I had a mitsubishi, but it got stolen.”

“Oh dear.” She touched the window. The glass was hot. When Aidan opened the door, heat billowed out. He must have been waiting for a while.

Aidan rounded the car. While she could still see his smile over the top of it, she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“A better question,” he said. “Is what are you doing here? Come on, Akina. Let’s talk.”

The restaurant was a treasure. One of those places that people walked into and asked how you’d found it. The correct answer was Two minutes on Google. The right answer was I just passed it and got curious, it’s got the most amazing smoothies/orange juice/booze/meat dish. Neither Jace nor Akina said such a thing when they entered.

Akina sniffed the air. It did smell like meat, and spices, and orange juice. And the perpetual gasoline and hot tarmac smell that California had in the summer. The walls were covered with wooden panels, hung with Turkish lanterns, decorated with paintings by local artists that were either minimalist or lazy.

A waiter directed them to a table. He couldn’t take his eyes off Aidan. The air around Aidan sucked in attention like a blackhole. She knew he could temper the effect. She did. But Aidan thrived on the notice of others. His mirror was one of his best friends. Possibly his only best friend.

Aidan ordered a smoothie with beets. She ordered orange juice. The waiter departed. Aidan leaned back and stared at her; they’d once had staring contests, which she’d thought was quite human, but humans couldn’t hold stares for hours. They could barely hold them for minutes. She often wondered how humans got anything accomplished with so much of their lives spent with their eyes closed. Though she had to admit, sleep was a precious thing. Her appetite for sleep had grown in the last few decades.

“You have a job,” Aidan announced.

She stared at him. He’d ambushed her at her job. She didn’t understand why it mattered. Dozens of people had jobs.

“But dozens of people need them, unlike us,” Aidan pointed out.

She sighed. She hated when he did that.

“But I love doing it,” Aidan said.

“It’s a good job,” she said. “I have regular hours. And it’s near the tram. It takes me twenty minutes to get home.”

“How adorably human.”

The waiter reappeared with their drinks. Aidan’s was red, a violent vibrant colour. Akina sipped her orange juice; the sign outside the store had advertised it as liquid sunlight. It might not be changing her in the way ingesting liquid sunlight might, but as far as orange juice went, it was quite good. The waiter took a few steps away. Then a few more. She and aidan got older while he did.

When they were alone, Aidan drained half of his glass. “Is that why you moved here?”

She tapped her fingernails on her glass. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a pit of humans. An epicenter of some of their most ridiculous dreams. On the way to your work someone asked me if I model. Someone else asked me to read a script just because I told them I was a producer.”

Ah. Yes. There was a lot of that. She felt bad for their hope. As far as she’d witnessed, human life was made of cycles. Births beget births. Death beget death. But hope did not beget hope. More often than not, hope was a narrow hallway that led to disappointment. It was one aspect of human life she did not envy.

“That isn’t why I moved here.”

“So why did you?”

“Change of pace,” she said.

Aidan laughed. Somewhere, a hurricane hit a building. “A change of pace? What the hell does that mean? What kind of pace do you think you’re going at?”

She shrugged. The same one as our waiter, she wanted to say. But she was not a liar.

“Why would you want to go their pace?” Aidan asked. His eyes were burning. To anyone else, he might look like he’d been shooting up. But he was as indomitable as a star because he chose to be. It was a benefit, or a curse, of their beings. Neither of them would ever feel the fatigue of a hangover, or the hopelessness of flunking out of school, or the physical exhaustion that followed a long workout. Listlessness was not unheard of but, Akina thought, it was a poor consolation prize.

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” she said. “They’re going quite fast, aren’t they?”

“But they’re not getting anywhere.”

“I think that’s a matter of opinion.”

Aidan made a face that said he didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. He probably didn’t. He cared about her’s, and they’d spent years apart, when she’d decided that she wanted years to matter, and he couldn’t understand why.

Aidan leaned across the table. He was warm as a tropical island. He smelled like beets. “You’ve had your fun. It’s been decades. Aren’t you a little tired of working?”

She gave it some thought. She wasn’t tired of working. That was the whole problem. “No. I don’t think I am. What would I do if I wasn’t working?”

The waiter came and gave them a basket or organic bread with quinoa on top. He took their orders, removed their menus, and came back with water. He cleared away Aidan’s empty beet juice glass, and Akina’s empty orange juice glass, then brought them refills. Outside, someone had dropped ice cream, and someone else was flying a kite on Venice beach, and people were building up their hopes and burning down their dreams and reinventing themselves in this fake Eden.

“You would do whatever you wanted to do. You would have whatever you wanted to have,” Aidan said.

“But that isn’t what I want.”

Aidan looked at his hands in his lap. His voice sounded a little odd. “You don’t want whoever- whatever you want? Even if you could have it now, without having to wait?”

Akina looked at him. She hadn’t seen his in a little over four decades. She hadn’t given him her address or telephone number. There was so much land, so much ocean, and they were in a restaurant in san Francisco, thousands of miles from the last country they’d inhabited together. “I have the rest of my life,” she said. “What’s the difference between now and a few more decades?”

Aidan gave it some thought. He said, “Nothing at all.”

Art by RovinaCai

Text by Lucie MacAulay

What The Universe Does

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

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

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

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

“The book in Sage Garden” she clarified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d missed a step, somewhere. “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wished I had more tea. “What?”

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

“Pardon?”

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

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

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

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

Art by Alex Konahin

Text by Lucie MacAulay 

Silver Apples Of The Moon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I won’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

I shook my head because I couldn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m going to Venice,” said the girl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t mean what?”

“What you’re writing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just… just like that?”

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay