Sanded Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In, sculpting?” I repeated.

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

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

“At sculpting,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t let me see you!” she ordered.

“Are you going somewhere?”

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

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

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

He said, “onward”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There are ways,” McKinnon insisted.

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

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

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

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

Her fingers itched.

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

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

“Revolutionizing again?” McKinnon said.

“The revolution is dying.”

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

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

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

Art by Ngyuen Thanh Nhan

Text by Lucie MacAulay

House Hunting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Devon prompted, “Tell her about your parents.”

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

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

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

“Why not? Simon, come on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pardon me?”

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

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

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

“But they can be?”

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

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

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

Simon rolled his eyes.

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

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

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

Art by Matthias Haker

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Hungry As Mirrors

At eleven thirty, the mirrors went dark and the doorbell rang. The first was strange because they hadn’t been so black ever before, though they had been empty once. The second was strange because it was late, and there was hoar frost on the windows and snow making it difficult to open gates and cross roads and drive out of ditches. Nuala watched the mirror in the hallway for another half a minute before she went to see about the door.

Nuala opened the door. She wasn’t hopeful about whoever was at the door. It was either an emergency, which would require immediate action and would disturb her lethargy and her bored mood, or it would be something trivial, which would do nothing to help her boredom. When she opened the door and spilled light onto the snow, she had to blink for a moment. The white snow blinded her and made it hard to make out the shadows just above it.

There were several of them. She had to count twice to get to six. Nuala also had to slow down and force herself to actively listen to figure out what had just changed about the air. It wasn’t the air, just what was in it; they were singing. The sixsome had begun all at once. They were precise in their words, no one fumbling and singing out of time. She wasn’t impressed. In fact, normally, she would be embarassed or shocked, enough to give them an impatient look and close the door as soon as they were finished. It reminded her a little of being ambushed by Christmas carolers in the town square. But Christmas carolers sang Christmas songs and this was… not that. It sounded more like a shanty tune, like something sun on a boat when there was no one around to hear you. It was like a song about drowning. She heard the word hungry in it, and the word watch.

“What the hell?” Kay, Nuala’s older sister, leaned out of the kitchen and glared in her direction. When this wasn’t enough, Kay emerged. “It’s friggin’ cold. You- oh. Oh, whoa.”

“Yeah,” Nuala said, because she disliked to be told off without having done anything wrong in the first place.

“It’s a bit early for caroling, isn’t it?” Kay said, which meant that she knew it was early and she didn’t have positive feelings about it. She was embarassed on the singers’ behalf but she wouldn’t show it. There was a politician’s smile on her lovely doll’s face, beneath her lovely blonde curls. Nuala was a little disappointed to see one of the singers return Kay’s smile. She also disliked it when people couldn’t see through Kay’s smile, but she couldn’t blame them, she supposed. Kay could even charm the things in the mirrors, sometimes. Or it looked like they were charmed. It was a pleased sort of smile on their strange faces anyway.

The singers didn’t stop singing. The cold rushed in with them, and a short gust of snow, like a dusting of sugar. Kay folded her arms over her chest, which seemed unnecessary to Nuala. It wasn’t that cold. But this was a polite way for Kay to inform the singers that she wouldn’t be entertaining them much longer, not if the outdoors continued to be as cold as they were. Kay leaned forward- she smelled like the shavings of an erasure – and tried to speak as discreetly as she could, directly in Nuala’s ear. Nuala tilted her neck three degrees so she couldn’t feel her sister’s voice directly on her ear lobe. “Go get some of mam’s ginger loaf. I don’t have any cash for them.”

Nuala thought of the black mirrors. There was a large mirror on the wall of the kitchen. She thought it was probably pitch black as well right now. She wondered if whatever was in the mirrors would see her getting the ginger loaf.

Nuala shrugged. “You get it,” she said to Kay, a little too loudly. The singers said nothing, but Kay’s ears pinked. Nuala let herself be manhandled just outside the door so Kay could pull it shut against the wind and more sugary snow-clouds. The radio was still on inside. Their mother was upstairs. There were no other voices; the mirrors must still be dark. Kay smiled at the singers again, as though apologizing for Nuala.

On of the singers moved. Her belt flashed, like there was a very polished buckle on it, or a piece of glass. Nuala tried to look at it discreetly, but she felt that the singers were watching her closely. They could not be distracted by their own voices. Nuala wanted to nudge Kay and point, but Kay wasn’t good at other people’s subtlety, only her own.

The singers began to wind down. Their voices muted just like the wind did, both gradually and quickly. Kay began to clap before it was over. Nuala was abruptly annoyed that she’d missed the exact moment it ended. “Gorgeous,” Kay said.

The singers put their hands before them, like they’d been carrying instruments and were laying them down. They all had flashing belts. It must have been a charm of some sort they carried, Nuala thought. Like a charm. One of them, a woman with a berry-red mouth, asked them, “Did you like it?”

Nuala said, “I’d like to know what it was first. I didn’t think I’d get sung at today. And not by strangers.”

Kay elbowed her sharply and obviously. She wanted the strangers to know that she was appalled by Nuala’s words, and less likely to give them a terrible answer.

The berry-lipped woman said, “That sounds fair.” Her eyes flicked to her left, to someone with dark hair and eyes. He had the sort of black hair that people argued didn’t exist. It wasn’t very dark brown- it was black. So black that all the accents in it were blue, like the underside of the ocean. He didn’t return her gaze. At least, Nuala didn’t think he did. He had mirror-black eyes and it was difficult to tell exactly where they were pointed.

Kay clapped her hands together, like she was about to organize a meeting, though no one looked like they were about to be organized. Nuala watched Kay in her periphery. “We don’t have nay cash,” Kay began, “but we do have some ginger cake if you’d like. It’s got pieces of crystallized ginger on top, and we’ve got tea to go with it. Or I can make some hot cider if you’d wait a few minutes.”

“We don’t have many minutes,” said one woman. She had a long, thin face, like someone had pulled on her chin and stretched it out. Her shoulders bent forward; her fingers were folded into her hands but there was something strange and numerous about the amount of knuckles she had. “We have many places to go tonight. You can come, if you’d like. We can always use more singers. Please, come sing with us.”

Kay shifted in the doorway. The light slivered and changed and flashed off the thin-faced woman’s belt. There was definitely glass on it. It flashed straight into Nuala’s eyes. Nuala tried to look into it, but it wasn’t very effective. There didn’t seem to be much to see. For all its reflectiveness, the glass was too dark for details. She looked at the woman instead, but the woman didn’t seem to notice that the glass was there, or that it was flashing. She withstood Nuala’s gaze easily.

Something climbed the wall of Nuala’s stomach. The glass on their belts were exactly as dark as the black-haired man’s eyes.

Kay laughed. Nuala almost couldn’t blame her, because the invitation was very ridiculous. But the singers didn’t look like they were waiting for a laugh. “I think the cake would do you better,” she said. “It’s warmer, and you’d need warm on a night like this. I can’t believe you’re out and singing like it’s nothing at all.”

“Everything seems colder at night,” the red-lipped lady said. She exchanged a glance with the black-eyed man, and then, like they were dolls on the same hinge, they turned at the same time to Nuala and regarded her. “And this night is long.”

“The longest,” Nuala said. She didn’t know why she’d said this. She was sure they knew, but she didn’t want them to think her unprepared for some reason. She did not want to seem an idiot to them.

“Really? If it’s the longest then you should definitely have something to warm up with, “Kay said. “Look, I’ll just go cut you each a piece of cake. Or I’ll bring the whole thing over here with some paper- just, hang on. I’ll be right back. I’ll put the kettle on, too.”

Kay edged back inside. The light slanted back and forth again; the glass winked on everyone but Nuala’s belts. She was glad the door didn’t closee entirely. The front yard was entirely dark without the hallway light.

“Was that a yes to our invitation?” The thin-faced lady said.

Impulsively, Nuala looked down at their belts without trying to be discreet. She said, “That’s not a lot of warning. I might not like it.”

They all exchanged glances. Some of them looked like they were looking at two people at once. All eyes were hooded and shadowed. Nuala put her hand against the door, ready to push it open. She might almost take the mirrors over this.

“You won’t know until you try,” the black-haired man said. He sounded amused and sure, like she had already agreed.

“There are other singers around here,” Nuala said. “What’s so special about us? Why us? Why now?”

“We will go ask others to sing with us,” the red-lipped lady said. “As we have before. Every year there are more people to sing with us. But there are also fewer.”

Nuala said, “Maybe not everyone likes to be in the cold and the dark all the time.”

She had a thought, when those eyes tilted at her, that she might never wash off their gazes. The eyes would be gone, but the gazes themselves would linger on her skin. “How many people have sung with you before?” she asked. Her head was full of black glass.

“More than now,” the red-lipped lady said. Their shoulders all tipped forward a fraction. Nuala heard the click of the electric kettle and saw the lights flicker as the kettle stopped stealing electricity. “This is your last chance for now,” the lady said. “Are you coming?”

Nuala had a household chore to complete. “Not tonight,” she said.

“We’ll come again,” the black-haired man said. The thin-faced lady’s mouth tilted and twisted like he’d said something wrong. “Soon. For your second answer.” It occurred to Nuala that his eyes had been on her since she’d opened the door.

Kay’s footsteps were loud. She’d just nudged the kitchen door open and it squeaked as she padded toward them.

It occurred to Nuala that his eyes had been on her since before she’d opened the door. And their voices didn’t just sound like caroling and wind. They sounded like the strange nights in the house. “My second answer will be the same as my first.”

The black-haired man said, “You can’t answer us now when we haven’t asked you a second time. Some people change their minds. We still haven’t even been introduced.”

Kay was almost at the door. Nuala said, “Maybe next time. Maybe not.”

The singers backed away from the door’s light quickly, but not hurriedly. They faded out of view the way wind died down. Nuala kept the door closed right up until Kay coughed loudly. When Nuala opened the door for her, Kay stared over her plate of ginger cake and her pot of tea at the empty yard.

“You scared them off, didn’t you?” Kay said to Nuala, unkindly. “God. You’re such a teenager. I doubt they’ll come back now.”

“You didn’t really want them to,” Nuala said as Kay stomped indignantly back to the kitchen. Nuala followed her and took the mirror in the kitchen down. It was a slightly lighter shade than it had been before the singers showed up. She took down the mirror in the hallway next. Then the mirror above her mother’s vanity, and the mirror in her room. The only mirror she could not take down was in the bathroom. She draped a towel over it instead. It was almost a normal colour, except for the shadows reaching across it.

When Nuala got ready for bed, a little past midnight, she brushed her teeth in front of the covered mirror. The window was open; the air was cold. The wind itself struck Nuala as hungry, just then.

She spat into the sink and ran the water. Then she heard it. It was just this one mirror, because she hadn’t taken it down. The sounds always started up like this, as gradual and quick as wind. She could hear their dismay at being covered, but it wasn’t comforting at all. The towel between the mirror and herself felt like gauze, like water, like nothing at all.

Nuala turned off the water and stared at the towel over the mirror. They knew she was listening. They knew.

“Put the mirrors back,” they said, all speaking at once, not a voice out of time. “We miss seeing you.”

Art by Barbara Florczyk

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Animal On the Inside

For a place in the middle of nowhere, Vannattan had people everywhere. They loomed in the backs of trucks (cars and trucks were never empty- someone was always in need of a ride somewhere) and choked the sides of the roads between farms and seethed on the edges of cornfields, and their animals filled the air around them like gnats.

I had eight brothers, and each brother wore his animal on the outside. This wasn’t their fault, necessarily. I could only blame them for their obedience; my mother had told them that it was best for them to wear their animals on the outside, and it’s hard to disagree with the hand that feeds you and pays your phone bill.

“Why?” I demanded to know when I saw all of their animals for the first time. I was mostly upset because of Jasper and his jackdaw. Jasper was willowy, though he wasn’t very tall. But he still gave an impression bigger than a jackdaw, I’d thought. It would be disappointing, or worse, it would draw attention. People liked to stare when they thought you wore a surprising animal.

My glacier-beautiful mother was busy sitting on a couch with embroidered cushions and plastic wrapping. She had a magazine that was almost entirely advertisments for shops too expensive to set foot in. She looked like she was licking her teeth under her lips, or maybe she had some Faberge eggs in there. “It’s natural. It’s more natural than wearing them on the inside. Is that tone necessary?”

I didn’t ask her if it was natural. I didn’t care if it was. I preferred my brothers just as they were, and I preferred to stand in the same room as them without also feelingthat we’d been joined by a third, uninvited guest from the zoo. My mother preferred them to have animals, because it was eight fewer people to which she had to turn her attention. And she preferred to see people’s animals- how would she know who to associate with without them? She had gone mad with power since my father and his ocelot had whisked away. They’d probably done this for good reason. When I told her this she whisked me away to my room. The tumbler only clicked the next morning when she unlocked my room on the way to work. Vanhattan was my next stop. The bus left every three hours. I had at least a three-hour headstart on my brothers. I hadn’t thought they would all follow me.

Vanhattan had no city corners, only country corners, which meant behind trees and in trees and behind bushes and in bushes if you wanted to be alone to focus on not crying. This was how Hector found me just after dark.

“Linda, this wasn’t your smartest move,” Hector said. He tugged me up with some difficulty. I liked to play ragdoll with him. Then I saw his pressed tweed blazer and the slacks he wore to impress company. I didn’t want to be responsible for sullying them. “You could have probably taken her car and driven it here.”

“I don’t like left hand turns,” I said. This was especially pitiful and not very helpful, so I turned away. I already missed the congested streets of the city. I’d been beneath this tree a lifetime already.

Daniel followed Hector, stumbling into the crabapple trees with us. He was out of breath and his forehead had a sheen on it like manual labour. He carried one of my sweaters over his arm. He gave us both a long look as he sucked in air and heaved his shoulders.

“Did something happen?” I asked.

Daniel opened his mouth a few times to give his mind time to demystify. His fox wound between his legs, tongue lolling between fangs. “Some of us have a shorter legs span,” Daniel panted, looking from his fox’ legs to Hector and his gazelle’s lanky ones. “But you found her!”

He tossed my coat at me. The collar of it still smelled the mustier parts of our mother’s flat. The fox eyes the jacket at I put it on. Probably it smelled like another animal; this entire place did. Vanattan was so full of the smell of other people, moreso than the city. I’d thought there would be fewer animals here, but I didn’t know then that Vanattan was filled with people who wore their animals outside themselves.

“If you were a bit faster, she would be too,” Hector told Daniel, nodding at the fox. Daniel and his fox looked indignant. “Wasn’t Adrian with you?”

Daniel had caught his breath enough to speak, but he waited a moment anyway. Probably just so Hector would give him that narrow-eyed look he was giving him now. “Let him behind to unpack. And shop. He was threatening us-“ He slid his eyes to me and smirked. He was the least frightening of my brothers, but he knew something that I didn’t, just then. For once, his ominous expression was actually ominous. “-by saying we might all be sharing rooms. Three to one. Or two.”

Hector’s eyelid twitched. His smile didn’t move. “We should have upgraded in terms of size. This is Vanatten, not New York. Three two a room sounds like an orphanage.”

They took me out of the shelter of the trees. Instantly we were in the presence of someone else’s animal. Even the wheat grass around us smelled as musty as an animal warren. I couldn’t tell what was regular farm-animal pee and what was the pee of many people’s animals hovering about, unwatched.

“Linda,” Hector said when we found the main road and sat down waiting for a truck to come by with enough space between hay and tools and other passengers for three. “Why Vanattan?”

“You couldn’t have picked somewhere else?” Daniel asked, wrinkling his nose and inching away from a tangle of stinging nettle.

Because if there was a place to get rid of animals, I thought, surely it would be the wild.

The transition to Vanattan was a difficult one. I don’t mean the physical transition- that had been a bus ride. I meant getting to know the city. It sat next to me and leaned over to know what I was doing and when I didn’t respond it opened up immediately to show me what it was up to. It pranced up to me and licked my hands. It was loud with all sorts of animal sounds: birds whistling, dogs howling, cats rumbling like car engines. Even in the dark, when animals stayed closer to their people, it felt like they were on all sides anyway.

Theo gave me a very specific set of circumstances that would allow me to leave the house. Otherwise, I was confined. They and their animals disappeared in the day. I stayed and thought of all of the vicious animals some people wore, the kind that needed to be restrained from goring the neighbour’s dog. We were three to a bedroom, but I didn’t mind. The must of boy was far superior and strong to the must of animal. I was the only one not horrified to be sharing a room. But they fell into a routine, as easily as if they were back in New York again. The kitchen smelled of Indian food whenever Noah had a bad day. Jasper tripped on the same stair every day and nearly kneecapped himself on the stair above that. Daniel and Theo fought until their animals fought as well, and their animals grew much faster than they did. Their fights were always catastrophic. We kept furniture at the sides of the rooms now.

I was inside for two weeks with small trips outside at infrequent intervals. My brothers did the shopping, which was a mistake in retrospect. We ended up having the different parts of different meals in the fridge that didn’t go together at all. Hector was looking through the fridge for something to make into a passable meal when Daniel stumbled through the door. His fox had turned into a coyote, and it tumbled in with him, legs tangled together. They disentangled themselves before they tumbled all over the apartment.

“How do you trip over one another?” Hector said as he rolled a couple of eggs around in his palm. I always thought when he did this he was asking for a floor covered in albumen, but the eggs stayed where they were. “I can’t work out which one of you trips the other one first.”

“Did you lay those eggs or did your animal?” Daniel eyed Hector’s lynx. It was always changing now; the day before it had been a snow leopard and for a moment I’d thought someone else’s animal had somehow got into the flat. But Hector said he could feel it settling down. “Oh wait, no eggs anymore. You can’t do birds anymore. Linda, what did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

Daniel’s coyote pranced into his room. Daniel shook his head. “Sounds awful. Take a walk outside.”

“Theo said it’s dangerous,” I said. I didn’t know why I was saying it; I was desperate to get outside.

Elliot emerged from his room then and snaked around Hector to the fridge. He was two months away from being legal, but you couldn’t tell by the way Hector frowned at the beer in his hand. He didn’t have a shirt on. He was sweaty from running with his deer. He said, “That’s how you know it’s where things are happening, runt.”

Hector kicked him in the ankle. He was trying to separate the eggs and the yolk into two bowls by putting holes in either end of the egg and shaking it. Albumen splattered the countertop. There were six eggs with which to do this. He might end up having his dinner for breakfast. He said, “Linda, you’d be safe around here. Just don’t get on the back of any strange trucks that don’t already have people on them. Oh, there’s a grove of trees near that farm with all the apple trees we saw on our second say. You’d like it.”

“If that was the last of them, I’ll eat you,” Daniel said to Elliot. Elliot rolled the beer can between his hands and then pressed it to the naked back of Daniel’s neck. Daniel yelped, “You traitor.”

Hector’s mouth made a shape like it was holding in a swear word when broken egg yolk began to leak through the hole in the egg. “I don’t even remember who taught me this trip.”

I came over to the bowls and picked up an egg. I didn’t see the point in poking two holes in it when there was an entire shell that would break. Hector wouldn’t forgive me for doing it unless he got his end result so I carefully cracked the egg one-handed, into my palm. I held the yolk in the cradle of my handle and gently shook it. Albumen leaked over the sides of my hand, into the bowl. It took a few shakes to separate it entirely. The yolk looked like a golden dollar, or the sun during a sunset when it was more saturated than blinding. I dumped it into the other bowl.

“Thanks, Linda,” Hector said. “Do you want to cut the vegetables?” I could do this the best of all my brothers except Hector. I felt honoured to be asked.

“You know,” Elliot said, “I saw a woman working with her monkey today in the park. Good with their hands, both of them. It’s like a sort of talent thing you both have-”

Daniel snapped, “Linda is perfectly talented with her animal on the inside.”

Later, when Hector had made dinner for half of my brothers and the other half had foraged or not come home yet, and they’d all split up to their rooms or to the garden or to the living room couch to play video games, I sat at the table and watched Daniel put together a house of cards. His coyote watched from another one of the chairs. I couldn’t tell how many of the beer cans by the door had been emptied by him. My brothers were all a little bit slower in the evening. They always seemed to get drunk together, so there were no degrees of drunk. Daniel’s hands always remained steady, though.

His coyote sat close to me, but I didn’t touch it. I could have- Daniel and I were close like that- but I knew it was impolite to touch someone’s animal, and if not impolite, it was shocking. I didn’t want to shock Daniel into destroying the house. “Does it bother you?” I asked. I tried to imagine my animal on the outside, interacting with the world without my control, being visible and hurt-able.

Theo and Elliot fiddled with the radio. There were advertisements for people who wanted to change their animals and were already settling. No one wants to settle on marmots, someone said. That’s really called settling!  They laughed sort of like crows.

Daniel laid a card top on the third row of his house. He said, “I just don’t always know what they’re there for.”

There was a grove of apple trees in Vanattan. Probably there were several, but this one looked the least like an orchard. The trees didn’t grow in rows. They grew without order. When the sun shone on them they looked dusted with gold. I wondered if that was where all the stories about golden apples had come from. The haze around them looked like the fuzz on a kiwi. It was a good place to watch people, because they all moved through the grove. It was in the sort of hub that had cropped up between farms. It was the sort of place that Vanattan was too small to have, but it was here anyway.

There were children with rapidly changing animals trying to climb the trees and then tossing apples between them. There were men who plucked single apples and shared them with the animals at their sides or on their shoulders. Women lounged in the grass with their bags and their animals beside them. Everyone co-existed with their animals, drowsily and indulgently. It was sort of complex to look at them all, but the longer I looked the less my brain told me there was a difference between the people and their animals. If Hector thought I couldn’t work out why he’d sent me here he was wrong. I had to push away some man’s nosy foxhound before it could put its nose up my skirt. Suddenly, I wondered what my brothers’ animals were like when I wasn’t around.

I was walking out of the grove when I collapsed. It was no fault of mine. Something had rammed into the back of my knees like a clumsy, miniature freight train. Whatever it was tumbled with my, rolling over my knees and onto my back. It felt like Theo, when he decided to sit on me. My mouth was full of grass and my palms were full of dirt. When I wasn’t breathing in loam, I had the clarity to slap at whatever was on me. I wasn’t careful. The jackal flopped over in the grass, either recovered or in shock. The black line along its back was raised. I touched the skin of my knees, which was red, and then the back of my knees, one of which had been grazed by a claw or a tooth. I couldn’t decide whether to be sorry or angry; surprise had taken over all higher brain function for the moment. By the time I’d climbed to my feet and decided that it was at least polite to check on the jackal, it had retreated into the tall grasses of the grove. I was unkempt enough to attract looks. I wondered who wasn’t watching their animal and how they felt now that I had touched it with my bare hand.

“Sorry,” I said. I was sure I wasn’t loud enough to be heard, and it didn’t bring me any comfort to say it, so I walked with as much dignity as I could muster out of the grove.

In the back of a truck pulling hay, on the way home, I tried not to think that if my animal were outside, then I would keep a better eye on it. I knew myself. I was the kind of thing to go bowling into other people’s knees by accident.

No one was in the flat when I got home. Out drinking or working- those were the only two options in Vanattan. Apart from taking your lunch in an apple grove and getting mowed over by animals. I went onto the computer, because Jasper had left it on and no one was stopping me. I wondered what jackals meant, but mot websites told me what I already knew. Different animals for different people, and jackals weren’t all the same people. I didn’t know that it was even a jackal; maybe it was a jackal for a day. Most people who were jackals seemed disappointed that they hadn’t somehow been upgraded to something larger, like a lion or a tiger. Someone with a lion reassured them that they didn’t want one. Lions were hard to maneuver on city buses.

I logged off the computer before my brothers were home. They were preoccupied with Elliot and Daniel, who were in a spat. It didn’t involve me, so I stayed out of it. I told Hector about the apple grove and agreed to go the next day as well. He still hoped to accomplish something sending me there. I liked the grove anyway. I’d decided when I’d finally brushed all of the soil out of my teeth.

I went to the grove in the afternoon, when no one was taking their lunch. It was only children with their animals now. It played a game where I tried to pinpoint the exact moment a mouse changed into a hawk. I could see how triumphant the children with larger animals were, as though their animals would stay so big when they settled.

There was only one adult in the grove, and he stopped and looked right at me when he spotted me. He looked sort of dapper, in a white shirt of a kind that I didn’t think people wore anymore. There were dusty paw prints on his slacks. It was too late to get up and leave when he started across the grass. We had made eye contact. We were maintaining eye contact.

“Is this seat taken?” He asked. He pointed at the ground beside me.

“I think seat is a little excessive,” I said, then pulled the remains of my lunch closer to me so he didn’t have to sit on apple core. “No, it’s not taken.”

The young man sat. He must have been Jasper’s height, but Hector’s age. He said, “You were here yesterday, too.”

This made every one of my hairs stand on end. Foolishly, because what could he do to me in a public grove. But I was startled. If I had an animal, it would have bristled just then. The young man must have noticed, because he leaned away. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he looked more uncomfortable than intimidated. “Were you watching me?”

“I was trying to apologize to you. My jackal knocked you over.”

I looked at him for a moment, stupidly. Then I had the good sense to look for his jackal, but there was none in the grass. “It was yours? I don’t see it.”

“It’s not a jackal, right now,” he said wryly.

“How did you know I would be here today? Then- what is it, then?”

“I’m not sure.” He sounded a little miserable, which kept me from snapping at him. He didn’t seem to have any more idea where his animal was than I did, but he also wasn’t looking around. “It keeps going back and forth between a jackal and a meerkat. I really thought it would settle on jackal, or that this was the stage before- I don’t know. But now it’s just switching between the two.” He sighed. He didn’t look exactly like a farmer, or someone who worked for one. He had slacks on instead of cargos, for one thing.

“Did you tell it to stay a jackal?”

“No point. It’ll stay whatever it stays. It’s hard to upgrade when you’re this old. Where’s yours, then?” He looked at me like he might be able to see my animal somewhere on my person.

“Not here,” I said. This was sort of a lie. “Are you on a break?”

He shook his head. That would be why he had no lunch, or refreshment at all. Anyone who worked the fields always rested with a full beer or lemonade or pond, depending on how thirsty they were. I offered him some nuts from my lunch. He munched and talked at the same time. He was surprisingly articulate: “Are you on a break?”

“I’m not working,” I said.

He squinted at me. “What do you do with the day?”

“Get knocked over by jackals.”

He rubbed his hands on his nice slacks, and then regarded the sort of oily residue it had left behind. This is why you shouldn’t wear nice clothing, it shows all the nastiness much more readily. “I really am sorry about that. I try to control it but once it starts settling. You know, you work with what you’ve got. It’s the four legs. I think it just gets clumsy and overenthusiastic. It’s better than being a baby giraffe. I had to apologize all the time when it just sidestepped into people. Being anywhere busy was terrible.” He gave up on the pants. “What’s yours?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He looked all around me. With his gaze this much closer I felt like crossing my arms over my chest. I waved to bring his attention away from me. “I guess yours won’t settle for a few years, or course.”

Settling seemed the worst part of this. I had some sort of vicarious dread fill me. “My animal isn’t outside of my, thanks. It’s not going to settle into anything. I don’t have time to look after it; I’ve got to look after my brothers’.”

He took another bunch of nuts without asking, but by now I didn’t really want them. He breathed around them, then managed, “Why do you have to look after them? Aren’t they capable?”

Of course they were, and I didn’t really do anything with their animals except avoid them, when they were around. My brothers did all the taking care of, and I just sort of hovered and wondered what would happen if they turned around and their animals wandered off or stuck a paw in the blender or an organ in the path of a speeding car. “As best as they know how, I suppose.”

“Some people could be better," he said diplomatically. Even though I led him to the implication, I didn’t like it. “So are you here to see how other people do it? Learned anything? Do none of them want their animals on the outside, like you?”

This question bothered me the most because even before I opened my mouth, I knew I didn’t have a straight answer. Hector sort of liked having his animal around, because he was never alone. Daniel liked to curl up with his and keep warm. Theo and Jasper were always entertained. Even Elliot, whose animal was small, didn’t seem to hate having it on the outside. And beyond that, I didn’t actually know if I hated having my animal on the outside.

“I’ve never had my animal on the outside.” I’d never tried. I could see him processing the fact that I’d never tried.

He took another handful of nuts. Maybe he needed them to think. He held one out to the jackal that appeared at his side. It’s face slid into a meerkat’s face, and then back, quickly. The young man didn’t even seem to notice when, jackal-formed again, it draped itself over his lap, like Daniel’s coyote when he was watching television. The young man tipped his head over and squinted in the sun. “You know, I think yours would be a little wild.”

I wouldn’t tell Hector about this conversation. He liked to say, I told you so. I told the young man, “Maybe that’s why we moved to Vanattan.”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay