Stalkers

Kiera didn’t want to travel with Alexei. She thought it was a particular gesture of bad will from the universe that Alexei was the only one to travel with this time. The universe had been doling out bad will these days, these years, as if it had been designed for it. But that was a sort of generalized bad will, like giving humanity a pitbull when they’d asked for a puppy. This felt personal, and Kiera resolved to right it later, by spending the least amount of time with Alexei as possible.

To be fair, he probably wasn’t having such a great time with her. He’d never understood why his sister hung out with her, why they chose to spend their time doing the things they did while he chose to spend his time complaining about things that made no difference when they were complained about, like cold tea or noisy dogs barking or the government or new failing safety measures around the over 50,000 population cities. Which was especially absurd, Kiera thought, because their own city didn’t qualify, with its population just upward of 20,000.

“Why is she here, of all places?” Alexei said, sounding victimized. Kiera was sure he meant to say, Why am I here? With you? And it had just come out wrong. The place itself was not all that bad.

Kiera looking up and down. It was one of those factories that had had a false front, a sort of area for tours where people saw machinery that looked more complicated than was actually required, and the beginnings of the a process and the final product and nothing messy in between. Kiera might even have been here once before. She couldn’t remember, which worried her. When the spores began to spread, two of the first things to go were art and memory.  No one needed art when they were struggling to eat, to hide, to run. And suddenly all of one’s memories of life Before were replaced with questions about how they could have possibly lived that way, then memories of life After. Kiera had always made it a point to keep her memories, but they were drifting away from her, like spirals of fog separated from the rest of the cloud that thinned out into nothingness.

They were picking their way through the entrance, Alexei grumbling about his rubber boots. Kiera had made him wear them, and had given them to him (they were her father’s, Before) out of kindness, and because she didn’t want him to step in any spore-infested water. The boots were high, coming up to both their knees. If they had to step in anything suspicious that was taller, they might have to turn back, but Kiera had thought she was being practical and sensible when she’d suggested the boots. Alexei probably hated practicality and sense, considering the things he often said.

“I could be at home right now,” he said, slamming the door behind them in a way that made Kiera want to bite his head off. If he was this loud, something else might. Alexei was fiddling with his bicycle gloves, as if the safety precaution of them offended him. Even with his gas mask on, she could tell he was frowning judiciously. “I could be watching television. I could be eating those stupid canned fruits she hordes. But no.”

“I’m so sorry you have to haul your sister out of a candy factory,” Kiera said, catching sight of a Cadbury_TM sign that had fallen off the wall. The edge of it had a soft white rime to it that Kiera didn’t like the look of. “I’m sorry she might actually be hurt. I’m sorry you don’t have anyone actually looking forward to you being back home.”

“And you do? Didn’t your boyfriend run away? Decide to take his chance with spore-heads rather than you?” Alexei was so amused by himself that his words ended in a chuckle.  

Kiera desperately wanted to reach for a chocolate bar in a display on a desk, but spores always got the food first. She wanted to smell it, but the gas mask wouldn’t let her. When the spores first spread, they’d used n-95 respirators, and she would have been able to smell the stale chocolate. That was back when n-95 respirators did the trick. Now it was gas masks. Stores had been vandalized and looted when people looked for gas masks, and long shirts and pants and hats and scarves and high boots and gloves and anything to cover themselves should a single spore come in through a crack in their window.

They passed walls covered with graffiti. Art may have been the first to go, but the survivors, the travelers and fighters, created new art wherever they went. Somehow spray paint was nearly as important as gas masks. They drew block letters and symbols on the colourful walls and phrases like THE WHORES EAT THE PLAYERS’ MEAT, and WHITE CROWN-THERE’S MORE AROUND. They were both true statements, Kiera thought, though she wouldn’t have said it that way.

“Does she even have her phone?” Alexei said, looking at his own. His battery was almost dead. Lily’s phone was notorious for running out of power, and since Kiera and Alexei had gotten the texts from her at least eight hours ago, it was likely that her phone was dead.

“It probably doesn’t matter,” Kiera said. “She’s inside, anyway. She said she was staying on the second floor in case- in case. She said to watch our step too.”

Alexei’s brows knitted in the large glass circles of his mask. He breathed out deeply, in the way that made Kiera’s skin crawl. “What? Why?”

Kiera stopped at the edge of a room- one of the room’s of the real factory. She said, “It’s rained.”

The room in front of them looked as though all the rain had been concentrated into it. It had flowed from the cracks in the walls, and the hole in the ceiling that trickled water from a room upstairs that had also probably been flooded. The room looked as though if might have been mid-renovation when the spores started attacking it. The smell was so pungent that Kiera caught a whiff of it through the gas mask. Her heart skipped. If they could smell it, it was bad. She also couldn’t see the floor through the water. That was bad, too.

“Do we have to go through this?” Alexei said, voice stretched with dismay. “Did she go through this? Did she have boots? Lily!”

Kiera turned on him. “Shut up. Jesus. I don’t know if she had boots. But come on, you should know your sister. She isn’t that stupid. She wouldn’t go through here unless she didn’t need boots.”

Alexei’s brow arched and disappeared beneath the mask. “Did she?”

Kiera rolled her eyes. She was bereft of any hope that this water was clear and uncontaminated, but it made sense to check. She cast around for something to put in the water. Softer metals might do, but there wasn’t any gold here. Just steel and iron and some alloy, probably. Wood would be alright. Or skin, she thought, briefly, looking at Alexei.

“Don’t look at me,” Alexei said. “I don’t have anything. And no, you can’t use my belt.”

“I don’t want to,” Kiera said. “It might actually be keeping your pants up. I don’t want to see things I don’t have to.”

Alexei said, “You wouldn’t be so lucky.”

Kiera made a noise, generated purely from annoyance, and went back to the room with the desk. She peered behind the desk but there was nothing but a white rime on the baseboards and the wheels of the wheely chair. There was also a pencil. Lead, she hoped, picking it up. Though graphite would probably work too. No one knew why it attacked metals the way it did, when the spores attacked all organic matter by growing- by infecting.

She came back to the manufacturing room where Alexei was leaning against a metal railing. It was pretty cavalier of him, Kiera thought, considering that if it fell apart he would go hurtling back into the water. Then she noticed he was also gripping the doorframe, his black mesh-clad fingers curled around it like a claw. She showed him the pencil, as if he were about to perform a magic trick with it, and he pretended to be uninterested. But when she dipped it into the water, parting the white film on the top, he leaned over to see the result. Kiera counted to five, slowly, then removed it. The white film closed over the top of the water again, like one of those mattresses that retained its shape the moment you rolled off it. Kiera held the pencil sideways, away from herself, and they watched it.

“That’s- well, it’s infected,” Alexei said in the same moment that Kiera said, “It’s stalked.” Alexei liked to use the term infection, as if it weren’t a mind-altering parasite, a destroyer. He preferred clinical terms, which did not properly describe the spore. At least Kiera called it what it was.

Either way, some of the white film that had collected on top of the water was eating away at the lead pencil- Kiera was sure now that it was lead- and starting to branch off into delicate, coral-like stalks on the end of the pencil. It was spreading up toward the pink eraser at the top, like a quick-growing vine strangling a tree. Kiera dropped it before the parasites could go for her glove. The gloves would only actually hold it off a little while. Ophiocordyceps manducilis ate soft metal, infected humans, and gnawed lazily at clothing. Even their boots, if they did not wash them off within hours of walking on top of the spores, would be eaten through. And then it would take only a single spore touching their skin before they had a problem.

“Not through here, then,” Alexei said, finally.

“Your powers of observation are astounding,” Kiera said. “And your ability to state the obvious with such a sense of discovery- amazing. Really. Also, there are stairs.” She pointed when she said this last bit, to the staircase in the corner. It had spores on the railing and the metal stairs, which wasn’t promising. But at least it would take them upstairs.

Alexei said, “It’s covered. Ugh.”

Kiera shared his sentiment, which was rare. But she also felt a prickle of irritation that Alexei was not already moving toward the stairs, that he thought they might have any options, and that it was possible that elsewhere people were protected in a metallic, air-tight dome from the spores while they prodded puddles with lead and tightened their gas masks and pulled their hoods over their faces to protect themselves from the possibility that the spores might be on the ceiling too.

They climbed the stairs to the second level. Alexei insisted on going first, clutching the revolver in his hand. There was ammunition in the breast pocket of his shirt, and in the pockets of Kiera’s jeans. They stepped consciously, without touching the white, crusted railing. O. maducilis crusted if it had been there long enough. Small fresh stalks stuck out of the crust. When they were mature enough, they would release spores too. Kiera had seen much bigger stalks, big as the foundations of a high rise, and the sort of spores they released, large as pillows, fluffy as clouds.

Alexei called Lily’s name, into the room in front of them. His voice changed when he was worried for his sister. Kiera was a little touched by it. If he wasn’t such a shit all of the time, then the few times he was worried for Lily might have endeared her to him. Alexei was peering left and right in the room, looking for a sign of Lily, while Kiera crossed the threshold, so he was the first to see the body, and let her know it by stumbling back into her, stepping on her boot, with a muffled exclamation of, “holy fuck!”

The body was long dead. The spores must have gotten it at least a month ago. It had that mildly preserved look, like a bug that had frozen inside its carapace. It was wearing clothing covered with spores, and its eyeballs were crusted over. One of its arms had been torn away, probably eaten, the stump reddish brown. There was a stalk growing out of its head, white like marble, fluffy with spores that hadn’t fallen off yet.

“Was it infected by spores?” Alexei asked. He lifted the revolver in a trembling hand. “It was a man, wasn’t it?”

Kiera made an irritated noise again. Of course it was a man. Every body that had been eaten was a man. The spores only settled in to plant their stalks and spread their seed. At that point, or before, when the man was still alive, still uninfected, it made a good snack for an infected women. They were a host, but not an instrument, not like the women. The women were the ones to watch out for. Several under 50,000 cities had succumbed to fungal spore exposure because of infected women entering the barracks. Afterward, all that was left were the mutilated bodies of men, fertilizing the spores, and the women that hadn’t died, still looking to eat and infect.

“Oh God,” Alexei said, in his different voice. “Lily, what-” The revolver went back and forth in his swinging hand as he bolted for the next room. Kiera swore and ran after him, on to the fluffy bed of spores, into the room that looked as though it was filled with winter. There were more spores than Kiera had ever seen. Piled on the floor. Falling from the ceiling. Even with their boots and their near body-suit clothing, and their hoods pulled up, they would have to be very careful not to let the spores touch their skin.

“Lily!” Alexei said.

At first Kiera thought he was calling her name, trying to draw her to them, but then she saw that was not the case.

Because Lily was already there. She was in front of the doorway opposite them. There were livid scratches on her neck, and white crust coming out of them. Her eyes were crusted white too, the lashes heavy with O. maducilis. Pus bubbled over it, and at her ears. A white stalk was growing out of her head, about two inches tall. Powerful spores grew fast. She was looking at Alexei with anticipation, Kiera with pensiveness.

When Lily had come out of the womb, one of the first people to see her, though she was only a month old herself, was Kiera. She had been her friend over two decades. She reached for Alexei’s gun. “Shoot her.”

“How-” Alexei’s hand was fumbling for it. They were taking slow steps backward, though Kiera didn’t thin that the spore made stalk-heads like the predators you didn’t want to alarm. Stalk-heads didn’t get alarmed.

“Do it, you wuss,” she hissed, reaching for the gun.

“I’m trying,” Alexei said, trying to pull back the safety.

Lily was advancing on them. Her eyes kept flickering between them, then beyond them, in a way that had Kiera spinning around, cursing herself for not remembering. Stalk-heads travelled in packs. The ones that had just come in the doorway behind her and Alexei did not look as good as Lily, though she had only been infected for a few hours. These ones looked infected by days. Unlike the men, who could not survive once infected, women lived days, sometimes a couple of weeks, with the spores burrowing inside them, until it frosted over every organ and they became a balloon of fungus. These ones looked ready to burst. Vitreous humour trickled from their eyes as it was replaced with spores. Some were already blind. But that hardly mattered.

Kiera grabbed for the revolver, pulling back the safety, and pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, hitting the doorframe, which exploded with wood chips and spores. None of the stalk-heads flinched. When Kiera turned her head she saw Lily still watching, though she’d stopped moving.

Kiera froze. One of the stalk-heads had a glass bottle in its hand, a rag stuffed inside. The end of the rag, hanging out of the bottle, had been covered with spores. An O. maducilis Molotov cocktail. This was something Lily might have come up with. A trap Kiera should have seen.

Kiera threw up her hands just as the stalk-head hurled the bottle at her. It struck her shoulder, the cloth flying up in her face. Spores plumed over her exposed neck, drifted into the collar of her shirt. They touched her skin, tingling just a little. Kiera remembered when she’d been stung by a wasp, the initial pain, then the waiting before the real pain started, in less than a minute.

Alexei looked at the spores on her skin, then to Lily. He grabbed the revolver back from her, before her hands had a chance to close on them. He laughed, as if this were all happening on a television and he could turn it off when he wanted to.

“Fucking perfect,” he said. “This is so typical. We’re both going to die. We-”

He didn’t get a chance to finish. Lily sprang at him. Kiera watched, hoping her best friend spared her a piece.

Art by RovinaCai

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Crackers

First, Leah closed the door on his hand. She wasn’t entirely sure that he was dead, so she felt somewhat badly about this. It took a few seconds, in which she had to lean down and ladder her tights before his hand was out of the way and the door shut firmly. That was one of five offices in the larger ‘Office’ that had a window. There were four others. And the windows could not be open.

Secondly, Leah went to the water cooler. One of those sad communal places where people in the Office gathered to complain about the Office, and how they only had cubicles whereas others had proper offices. This was not the life they dreamed about for themselves in their late twenties, they often said, as though saying it would prompt the universe to create something more techni-colour for them, something with spangles and tulle. Then the water cooler was one of the only furnishings that had not been turned over in a mad dash for the Office door. Leah’s throat was swelling with dryness, furring as if mold were growing in it. Water, she thought. That means I need a drink.

Thirdly, water was probably not the priority then, Leah thought, after a moment. Her breaths sounded as if they were being churned out of her by a machine, as if each one produced carbon dioxide and cotton balls. But she needed to close the other office doors, seal herself off from the windows. It wouldn’t stop them. Locks hardly could, and those doors didn’t have locks. But she would feel better, knowing that they couldn’t smell her fear. But maybe it was seeping out of the windows anyway, the way it seeped out of her. She tried not to look at the face of her coworker as she stepped over her. She and Jill had gone out for drinks the night before, and Jill had done karaoke on a stage, though Leah hadn’t been brave enough.

Fourthly, Leah found quickly that one of the offices- the one belonging to Dean Ackleman, whom she had never much liked, though she felt badly about it now, looking at the stains on his carpet and the pieces of him that were visible around the edge of his desk- did not lock. She swore, several times, because it made her feel better and the alternatives were to cry, which wouldn’t do any good, and scream, which would do the opposite of good. She tried not to remember the time Ackleman gave her a box of her favourite loose-leaf tea at an Office Christmas party, as she grabbed an overturned chair, sat it upright, and jammed it against his office to lock him in. He was probably dead, she reasoned, though she didn’t check.

Fifthly, Leah decided that closing the windows first, in all of the offices, was probably a good idea. She didn’t like the idea of being stuck in here with all her coworkers- it was never an appealing idea, really, but being stuck with her coworkers’ corpses was even less so- but she liked the idea of letting something else in less so. She stepped over another coworker, or his legs, because he was propped up against the cubicle’s wall. He was pale, like china, like a piece of crockery that had been filled with blood and broken. There were black marks all up his arms that reminded Leah of the lines of a mosaic. Thank God he was dead.

Sixthly, why did Leah thank God? She’d never believed in God. Possibly lots of people had stopped believing in God when they looked outside and saw what was waiting for them. Possibly, there was no one else outside. Possibly birds had stopped chirping and the sun had stopped shining and Leah was the last person alive. Leah found that the fourth of the offices was blocked by Richard, who was sprawled there, but didn’t look particularly dead. If he wasn’t, she couldn’t help him yet. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him away from the office door. If she didn’t want to close the windows, he was actually heavy enough to have been a deterrent, to stop something getting through the door.

Seventhly, Leah went back to the water cooler and grabbed one of the paper cups. The water cooler was three quarters full. She felt she could probably drink all of it. She might have to, if she was going to be stuck in there for ages. She tried to remember if they had more bottles of water. She gulped down the water. Richard had weighed so much. She tried to listen for a sound at the windows, in the offices, at the front door of the Office. There was nothing. Not even the hum of cars outside. Only the hum of the printer.

Eighthly, Leah wondered what the next step would be. She tried to think practically, and couldn’t help but be reminded of her high school graduation, of entering university and feeling betrayed that the previous twelve years of education did not prepare her for taxes or mortgages or apartment hunting or CV-writing or anything pertaining to survival and the real world. And university had not prepared her for surviving this sort of disaster. She might have to raid grocery stores, and warehouses, and outlets, and convenience stores that were full of bodies like Jill and Richard. She tried to imagine never speaking to another human being, if she was the last one left alive. Things might get better, or they might get worse. She accidently stepped on someone’s hand as she backed up, then stepped off quickly, and apologized, as if he were alive.

Ninthly, Leah looked around for something she could use as a weapon. There were several pieces of broken glass. Every glass dish, and some of the finer porcelain ones, was cracked. Like an infection of hairline fractures had spread through the cabinets that served as the staff room. The glass mirror inside Morgan’s cubicle was cracked. Every time Leah looks at the splinters across the small windows in the office doors, she thinks she hears the humming begin again, but it’s still just the printer. Leah takes another sip of water, but she only tastes the plastic cup.

Tenthly, Leah took off her blazer and pulled as much furniture as she could in front of the office doors. She realized that her throat was still dry and that no amount of water would help, probably. She wished she had drunk more the night before, enough to be sick and to not come into the office. One of the exit signs flickered. She hadn’t realized how many of them there were, but they all seemed pointless, suddenly. She didn’t think she would be making an exit any time soon.

Eleventh, Leah went back for Richard. She knew how to check a pulse, in his wrist, but he was wearing a suit jacket, and had cuff links in his cuffs. Getting them off, checking for life, was looking less like a priority. Especially when she felt the buzzing under her feet, as if there was construction near by. She thought about her boyfriend, who was a construction worker and, if he was alive, might be thinking of her, or might have packed and was climbing into his car, speeding onto the highway that led out of the city, south, to his family. She’d kissed him four hours ago. He’d tasted like toothpaste. Right then her mouth still tasted like plastic cup. Then like terror, when the splintering began.

Twelfth, Leah dropped Richard’s wrist. The splintering was like the sound that came before an explosion, but an explosion was a quick release of fear, not the quiet hum that built up when they were near, that never reached a zenith, or that no one thought reached a zenith until they were already dead. Shattered like the windows and the glasses and the crockery. It was like the hum of cicadas, if it could rattle bones. Leah didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to scavenge for food or give up running water or electricity and live in a world that was worse than archaic, because it had once been civilized, but she didn’t want to die, either. Richard was probably dead, she decided, and dove toward the bathroom. It was a single bathroom, which usually meant long lines. No line then. Leah didn’t look at the mirror. She grabbed her blouse and pulled it off, jamming it under the door, glad there was only one piece of glass in this room, over the sink. Though, maybe the toilet would shatter too. She pressed her back against it anyway, felt the cold porcelain through her camisole. She clapped her hands over her ears, pressing in until it ached.

Thirteenth, Leah shut her eyes. The water in her stomach was sloshing. Plastic and copper were in her throat. She could hear the mirror cracking, even through her hands. Her insides, the pieces of her, were shaking. She couldn’t hear it, but it wasn’t something you heard. She blinked and saw a glimpse of her feet.

She told herself she would be all right. Even though she saw the cracks. 

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

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