Fiction

I still have hands and feet and eyes – this will serve me well. I am somewhere in a winery. The vines hang and hands work to pick the grapes: frantic, moving, cloth-like hands. I am looking out at the expanse of the Western Cape. I can see the lights of Stellenbosch in the distance where the students are. Where, possibly, my son is studying – it would be helpful to still know these things.

I don’t know exactly where my feet are heading. Those scampy stumps have a mind of their own, one I can never control. What drove me from the Atlantic seaboard to here was the pure instinct of these two feet. They brought me to this strange country in the first place. 

Herbert would be at work. He wouldn’t know for hours that I was gone. So run. Feel the magic, the heat dripping. Think of summer holidays running through the sand dunes in Gullane, the North Sea ice still clinging to your body, draining the Scottish soul before it had the chance even to be half-filled. Here, the wind blows but the earth is silent. Nothing moves but working hands, whistles in the distance, the occasional rumbling of a jeep engine. It could mean war, or it could mean nothing. 

I am not here to interpret anymore. I never was. I was here for love – something like that. That word felt awfully heavy but, then again, Herbert was a destiny laid out. When I met him in that dusty bar in Chelsea – was it 1970? – I knew in a second that he was a man I wanted. Oh, the way he talked to the staff: controlling, barbed but polite. The deference of the others there. The opulent wealth that he was never obtuse about. To a young model making her way through London, Herbert seemed like the perfect conduit to the inner circle. Back then my accent was mocked – it was the only part of me that appeared unconventional. Herbert liked that, back then. He bought me a drink before anybody else in the room had even sat down. 

Now, we must keep moving. If the jeep is the war, tanks coming in, if the townships are burning, then we must keep moving. I have time, but the Cape is not a safe place to linger too long past nightfall. Herbert’s goons will soon be swarming, needle-eyes looking for white amongst the black – a woman amongst the men. In this country of division and classifications, to be invisible was impossible. But I will try; God, I will try. Maybe I will cross a border. Maybe I will reach Durban or East London and pay a man to take me across in his boat to a new reality. 

Among the vines I think, Soon these words, this language, will mean nothing to me, I’m sure. Soon it will be a memory, lost to me. Me and June, my old English-speaking companion, mocked it in the tearooms, for it was an ugly way to speak, we thought. English is much more serene, we thought, but since independence it is now the second language in a country which has over thirty. Herbert would laugh and say, “Afrikaans is our heritage.” And later, while watching the news: “Look at how the Africans speak with all their clicks – so far away from anything a dictionary could document.” It was foreign to his ears, but it just made me think of something in the wind blowing through the veld: ringing, ringing, ringing. The voices of ancestors ringing, ringing, ringing. The voice of the country ringing, ringing, ringing. I was hearing it more and more often now. Even the maids would speak it to their children in their quarters, where they used to speak only broken English for their education. 

A long time ago, when you were out shooting in the country, I heard the same whispers of the language these wine workers are speaking now. It is different from the ones I usually hear. I don’t know the names but I have heard it only once before, spoken by the boy in the corner, huddled under the bushes – a long way from the Cape Flats or wherever he had come from, out in the wilderness.

Can you remember the voice that haunted these valleys? They had shot an eland, Herbert and his friends. The black boy watched the bullet so intensely and analyzed the death of the animal as though it were a human experiment. I think I was the only one who saw him. He had on a ragged Manchester United strip, a pair of shorts, and a tatty leather jacket. I let him stay hidden. I thought he may be with the terrorists, but still, this seemed like something to do.

The boy whispered to a figure who was obscured to me. He spoke in this language, this strange tongue. He seemed to be looking for something. I thought it may be a militia, and I thought it was a deep irony that the police commissioner might die being hunted like sport. I could imagine the blood leaving his body and saw him dying on a hilltop like a Voortrekker. He was born in the city and knew nothing of the farms, but to die like a farmer protecting his land like the Boers of old seemed to be every white man’s dream. We will die here as folk heroes and be remembered as villains. 

He didn’t die and the boy disappeared soon after. Later that day, it was discovered, some wiring had gone missing from an animal’s cage.

I must stop looking at this woman now, in the vineyard, for she looks scared. I always hated that look of fear. It’s why I don’t look at Black people very often; even my maid must turn away when I enter. Herbert likes to stare right into their eyes. 

First, before I move, I will go into the farm and ask the owner for some water. I will then ask him for directions to a shop where I will buy what I need. It is early enough in my escape that this holds little risk, but I need to get plenty of supplies while I still can – as many supplies as I can carry. To deal with the man at the farm, I would need my wits about me. Indeed, he would think I was trouble out here all alone; then he would see me and think I was in trouble, then lastly he would hear the surname ‘du Plessis’ and think he was in trouble. 

I have to work out how to get to the farm from his wineries without immediately being labeled a thief, or worse, a worker leaving before they were permitted. I can see the white facade of his house, the well-maintained green garden patch outside, a pond like a moat, a fence, guard dogs. The vineyard’s centerpiece surrounded by those cloth-like hands: picking, picking, picking. You can’t stay here, though, lying amongst the vineyards. The man will find you eventually. Maybe the police will know by then, maybe your picture will be on the TV.

Better to go now while I’m still invisible. So stand up, look at the workers and ask for their silence. They will listen to me, for I look official, like the wife of the vineyard owner. Hell, they probably can’t tell the difference. I probably am her, just as the voices here probably sound like the little boy in the football strip to me. When I make the ‘ssshhh’ gesture towards them, they say nothing. I creep around the bushes, around the back of the house to the front. I start to imagine the landscape as a chess board and me as a piece, with the liberty to move in any way I want. I approach the house, ring the bell, and watch a young man in his checkered shirt come down. 

“Tannie, what is it? Are you okay?” 

Checkmate. 

“Come in for a tea, Auntie,” he says to me. “Come in and we will be safe.” For outside, the hands are still moving and the workday is not yet over. The curfew had not yet been imposed, the military jeep was not yet an enforcer, just an observer. But wait until night falls. Maybe I will see the flames and hear the sirens we read so much about. This would make me happy. I would like to see a little bit of destruction. I don’t hate this country, nor do I love it, but to watch something burn is exhilarating – even an inanimate object such as a piece of paper, lit alight by a schoolboy until it is cindered ash. That’s how I feel about dear old Suid-Afrika: a piece of paper slowly smoldering. Now I was a jumping ember.

Scotland burned for me a long time ago. Now, it is a place of memories as opposed to a country, but maybe that’s all a country is. And if the memories are different for everyone, then everyone has a different country. That means there are six billion countries; that means this place doesn’t exist. This is why, Herbert, your memories are useless, your heritage a sham, because this land is a land is a land is a land, just like Scotland is a land is a land is a land is a land; and feet walk and different faces smile and cry, bodies buried underneath rot and time’s needle moves. Stay stagnant, for the land doesn’t.

Oh, I used to talk about these things in cafes in London. That seems like a long time ago, when the world had no passport and no tramlines; when there was no signs to say, “You can’t step here”. Ot if there was, I barely noticed them. Now, I tend to stick to home and to cooking. Herbert doesn’t mind what I do as long as I cook for him and let him have sex with me twice a week. These are the two constants of our marriage; they keep the wheels of his life spinning, his business booming. 

But now I have gone. Now that I have slipped, I can’t recover that reality. And the reality of the passion I had in the past with different men, young men, is a bygone one. It is not a question of returning to London, it is that the 60s are a time I can never have back – they were freedom, music, hash; I don’t know if they existed in the same way here. I had an image which could be captured irrespective of whose arm was around my waist. My disgraces were all still ahead of me, and to be disgraced seemed then like the greatest thing ever. Now it just seems like a headache. Could you imagine your figure in a bikini now, or a tight-fitting Dolce & Gabbana piece? It would make you laugh.

I’m accepting the young man’s offer. He called me “Auntie”. I’ve never learned to love that particular Afrikaner deference to age; it just makes me feel old. The house is large but ramshackle. And who is the boy? He looks to be in his early twenties; he has an unkempt beard and a tired look. It is clear he is not the owner as he takes me through to the kitchen. 

“You want tea?” he says.

“Tea would be lovely,” I smile politely.

“Sit down on the sofa; make yourself comfortable. My dad will be back soon and you can tell him what’s going on.” 

He is heating up water in the stove; the back door is open and the dogs roam, patrolling up the edge of the barbed-wire fence. I don’t know what to tell the owner when he comes. I need to think of a good reason for pitching up at the door of a random vineyard that doesn’t make me seem dangerous. The boy pours the hot water onto the teabag but doesn’t let it settle; for two seconds he swirls it around and then quickly takes it out and puts it in the bin. The tea tastes ghastly when he brings it to me. He offers his hand.

“Johan.” 

“Pleased to meet you, Johan.” 

“You too. What brings you here? Are you okay?” He looks me over with a sense of politeness, respect, and concern – the holy trinity.

“I’m fine, just lost.”

“Oh well, we are just outside Stellenbosch. Where is your accent from?” 

“Scotland.” 

“A Brit. Oh, my dad won’t like that,” he chuckles. “What brings you here?” 

“I’ve lived here for 18 years. I’m married to a South African in Cape Town.” 

“My dad will give you a lift back to the city if you’d like,” he says kindly, smiling. “It’s not safe to make the journey alone, with the current situation. My dad knows the route; it’s a little longer than usual but –” 

“I don’t want to go back to Cape Town. I’m heading to Durban.” 

He looks at me inquisitively. “You’ve got a long way to go, tannie, a long way. Do you not have a car?” 

“No, but I need to find a friend of mine. It’s important.” 

“Well, okay. What’s your name again?” 

I pause. “Linda. Linda Clark.” Don’t tell him you are Sarah du Plessis and he will trust you more… 

“Well, Linda – my dad will be back soon. Until then, please make yourself comfortable.”

But all I could see was the mess, the heat shining through the windows illuminating the stub of a rifle. 

*

When the owner returns, he turns out to be a man whose stature does not match that of his farm. He is much smaller than his son and he wears a white shirt and brown trousers. Still, he commands the kind of respect I only hold for Herbert, and even that is now fading. He talks to the boy outside and then introduces himself. He says very little.

“Hello, Linda. You should stay with us tonight.” 

“Oh, no, it’s okay. I’m just looking for directions to the shop –” 

“Curfew is coming soon; you shouldn’t be out.” 

“But I need to –” 

“No, lady, I won’t take no for an answer. We can’t have the good women of this country out alone when the place is burning. You will sleep, and tomorrow we phone your husband, ja?” 

I don’t want to stay, but I know resistance is futile. I know he won’t listen to those words; and I know what he said is right. He continues, taking my silence as a yes: “We have a spare room, please take it; Johan will show you.” That is all he says, and then he disappears again. Before he does, he picks up the rifle – this is the main thing I notice. 

When Johan shows me the room, I see that it is a farmer’s room. I haven’t slept somewhere so small since the 60s – since London squats and, before those, Govan tenements. I was poor then, poor as can be, but now I hardly remember it. Now for one night again I will sleep like a member of staff; a high-ranking one with her own room, but still staff. I guess it will have to do. I guess I will need some food.

Johan says, “Is this okay for the night? I know it’s not perfect, but it is safe. Pa makes sure.” I’m sure he does. I’m sure the fence keeps you safe. I’m sure the expanse of the Cape, though, harbours many shadows, and some shadows are smarter than others. Smarter even than the blunt instruments used by your father. His gun and his fences can’t hold out forever – or maybe they can, I don’t know. As long as they work for the night, nothing else matters. I will leave early in the morning before the phone call can be made, before I can provide him with a number I don’t have.

“I’ll leave you to get comfortable. I’ll be here if you need anything.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Johan, but I am quite hungry.”

“Ja, ja, of course you are,” he grins. “I can make some chicken? Or I might have some boerewors?”

“Chicken is good.”

“Of course, give me half an hour.”

I sat there for forty minutes, watching the walls. There were three books and only one in English: an Agatha Christie murder mystery. I read it with intrigue until he called me, knocking on my door.

“Let’s have some chicken then, eh?” He smiled. I was starting to like this boy – polite, well turned out, and funny; kind of like my son. They were both army skippers as well; they must be.

“So, Johan, why aren’t you out there with the SADF?”

He looked at me, worried. “I’m just back.” 

“So, you have already served your conscription? You don’t look old enough.” 

“Ja, ja, well, I have a youthful face, but I was out in Angola.” 

“Okay, enough said.” 

“Yes, better not to talk about it. I might go back out if I can’t stay here.” 

“What, to the townships?” 

He shrugged. “You know this is the last chance for us in Africa. I have to fight. What happened to Rhodesia can’t happen here, you know. Anyway, let’s not get started on politics. An English and an Afrikaner, eh? Never ends well.” He laughed. “But we must be united. Tell me about your life in Cape Town.” His eyes lit up. “What does such a beautiful woman do with herself in the city, huh? I bet you have such an exciting life.”

“Not really, Johan. I’m a housewife.” 

“Ah, the domesticated woman! How many kids? Who is your husband? What does he do?” 

“You ask a lot of questions.” 

“Who doesn’t? You just turned up here like a ghost.” 

I couldn’t help but laugh and smile at his youthful arrogance. Oh, the boy was sweet; he had fight and candor and passion – all misdirected, of course, but when had that ever not been the case? “I don’t have any children, and my husband is a businessman.” 

“Oh, a housewife with no kids? How come? What do you do all day?” 

“It’s quite rude, Johan, to ask a lady why she doesn’t have any children.” 

“And it’s quite rude to turn up unannounced and make me cook you a meal, yet here we are.” His grinning, contemptuous face – I realized he had stopped referring to me as tannie or auntie.

“Well, I never wanted any. And I cook and clean and keep my house for my husband.” 

“Oh yeah? And why aren’t you there now? What’s your business in Durban?” 

“Well, it’s part of a business deal.” 

“Oh, okay.” He winked. “A business deal. What are you really running from?” 

“None of your business.” 

“Oh ja?” He smiled.

I scraped the rest of the chicken around my plate. “Do you have any coffee?” 

He grinned. “No, but we can have a cigarette.” He lit one and passed me the packet. 

“Sure.” I took it and smoked. I don’t smoke often now; I used to back in the day. Who didn’t in Glasgow in the 60s? And who didn’t in London in the 60s? Indeed, who didn’t smoke anywhere, at any time, in any place, in the 60s? 

“So, Linda, I don’t care what or who you are running from.” He sighed and exhaled the smoke in an almost erotic manner which surprised me, as he leaned back against the chair, eyes measuring my body inch by inch. “It’s good to have some company here. Since the barracks, I’ve just been here.” 

“You don’t have any friends? Girlfriends?” 

“No,” he grinned. “Nothing like that. I’m alone on the farm. All alone.” 

“Well, you should come to Cape Town. You know, study and –” 

He laughed. “Study what? Eh, I don’t have any qualifications, and I’m good on the farm. I have my staff. I’m a good manager.” 

“I’m sure you are a good manager.” I roll my eyes. Yes, I’m sure you are, with no education and no qualifications. 

“Ja, I am. They respect me and I respect them; it’s simple.” He scratched his chin. “In the city, though, I would love to hear the music.” 

“Not much chance of that anymore.” 

“Well, it must still be more exciting than here. Tell me, how is England?” 

“England is England. I am from Scotland.” 

“Ja, but the only difference is the rugby teams.” 

“You may think that.” 

“I do. So, how is Scotland then?” 

“It’s okay. Different from here.” 

“Everywhere is different from here.” 

“Most places are more like it than you think.” 

“You travelled a lot then?” 

“No, I’m just saying –” 

“Just saying what?” His grin was starting to annoy me no end. 

“I just mean … Oh, it doesn’t matter. Let’s stop the heavy stuff for tonight. I’m tired; I might go to bed.” I try to sound resigned to bed. 

“There is still more wine,” he says. 

“Well, you can finish it.” 

He pours me a glass then says, “I’ve already poured you a glass.” 

Ah youth – terrifying, backbreaking youth. “Fine, I’ll finish the glass.” 

Johan talks about music and then cricket and then he talks about Dallas. I tell him, “I don’t watch TV.” He tells me I’m old and that I really must. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the SABC would never show anything that interests me. I know he would then, no doubt, ask what does interest me, and I don’t want to answer that because I don’t know – and even if I did know, I think the answers would worry him.

As we are sitting there, getting drunk, and the wind shakes the house gently, we are slowly moving closer. First he touches my hand and then my leg. I haven’t felt the touch of another man in a long time, and he is so much younger than me.

“I could be your mother, Johan.”

He chuckles, “But you’re not,” and leans in to kiss. I feel his unshaven skin bristle against my chin. At first, I pull away and keep my mouth firmly shut, but then I open and allow him to push me towards him, submitting to the vineyard, submitting to the Cape, falling down into the boy’s hands. I wonder how often he gets visitors. 

“Do you want to go to your room?” he whispers, now gently moving his hands up my top, feeling my breasts. I don’t know, but I nod and follow him. It is over in 10 minutes. Johan is still laughing, as if something about sex amuses him, while we sit beneath the covers of my bed. We are not touching. After he cums, we do not kiss. He just puts a cigarette to his lips.

“Hey, tannie, that was nice, wasn’t it? I wish more ladies got lost out here.” He chuckled. “Wow, I haven’t felt that way since Angola.”

“What does that mean, Johan?”

“Ah nothing, nothing. I wish I could sleep next to you, but my dad will be back soon. I’m going to have a bath and let you sleep.” He doesn’t kiss me again before he leaves. He turns off the light as if commanding me to sleep. 

I wake up at 4 a.m. and think of how to leave. The first step is simple: I climb out of the window. But then how do I get over the fence? That is the big lingering question. I can’t scale it. So instead, I decide to wake Johan. I stand in his room, shaking his sleeping body. “Johan, Johan,” I whisper. I look at him at this moment and see a child. Earlier seems a long time ago now; a different person almost. He wakes up.

“L-Linda, what is it? Are you okay?”

“How do I get out the gate?”

He switches on the light. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes, yes, please – I need to, you don’t understand.” 

“Well, make me understand and then I’ll help.” 

“Well, I just can’t go home.” 

“Where will you go? Durban is too ambitious; you’ll never make it.” 

“I don’t care where I go.” 

“Well, I’m coming with you.”

He stands up stridently, suddenly putting his stuff together: four pairs of pants, two shirts, and a book in an army rucksack slung over his shoulder. 

“No, you’re not.” 

“Yes, yes I am. Come on, I need the excitement.” 

I think I could let him believe I could be with him just so he can get me out of here. “Okay, okay, fine.” 

“Really?” He grins. 

“Yes. Now, how do we get out?” 

“Oh, easy, I have the key.” He takes it from his bedroom drawer. “I can open it.” 

We are out in the fields. It is dark. We do not have torches. I can barely make out anything but the guiding lights and sounds from the townships; the armored cars in the distance that endlessly move towards it. What lies in front of me, though, is empty.

I take Johan’s hand and let him guide me through the winery. It feels quiet without those voices, with only Johan whispering about where we can go next. I’m not listening. I let the words wash over me, but I am used to humoring men and know what to say so he believes my sincerity. It’s very easy with men; they tend to believe what they want to believe.

When we are through the gate, Johan says, “Where should we sleep?” I point out those glittering lights and walk towards the motorway, in the direction of the township. Johan looks at me as though I am insane. “We can’t go down there.” 

“Are you coming or not?” 

Johan just freezes. He doesn’t come. He sits and watches me walk down, confused. I can hear the ringing of something. I sense my life could very soon be over. I wonder where my son is; I wonder what is happening in Scotland right now; I think of Herbert’s goons out looking for me; I think of blood and Manchester United.

I look back at Johan as he gets smaller and smaller, and then toward those lights – the shacks, the fires that glisten ever bright.

“Come here.”

She had a perfect, late-summer cherry between her teeth and when she broke its skin an impossible red ran over her tongue, between the seam of her lips. She spat out the core and the fruit along with it, looking like some boxer on television who’d just been punched in the jaw and worked up a gob of blood and pulp. She kept only her mouthful of juice and stained the ground with the rest.

The air was blue and early over the meadows, the world tucked away, new and untouched. Him and her. Their little secret. The orchard folded over them, encrusted with dew and the spilled guts of devoured fruit, dampening the parched grass and cooling their bare toes. When she pulled him to her, he could taste the sweetness lingering on her lips until she bit him hard enough to draw blood.

He’d met her while the early-May light was still reaching the world in watery beams, while the tulips were disintegrating and teachers were still droning away at their blackboards. She was leaning on the wall three lockers down from him, bruised knees showing under the hem of her dress. He’d watched her before, strawberry hair always in a tangle, gaze never still enough to hold. Until now. When he asked for her name, she reached out a hand with nails bitten raw.

“Cherry,” she said, cutting off his circulation. “Cherry Stritter.”

Summer had come on fast that year, and his pulse had quickened with it. Everything else was long and slow. The sun dragged across the endless days and the two of them disappeared into the meadows, into acres and acres of land once kept as a public park and now left to run wild, to swallow up those who didn’t want to be found.

In the mornings it was cool enough to wander under the fruit trees, to climb for high-up cherries and dance around the early-dropped plums coating the bleached dirt and stubby yellow grass. At midday, the sun left no shade and he watched from the bank of the steadily shrinking pond below the orchard as Cherry waded in. In the afternoon, the light cast wiry shadows from the trees they sprawled under, sweating away the most sweltering hours, the hours that Cherry said turned piss to steam before it could hit the dirt.

The sun was plotting to reach them with its slanting fingers, shimmering on the thicket of high grass surrounding the bald patch beneath their tree. Cherry was on her back, hair dragging in the dust, feet propped on the knobby roots snaking beneath them. She tossed one in the air, let it fall. Her fingers dug up a clot of dirt, the closest thing to a pebble she would ever find out there, and tossed it in his direction without looking.

She got up and wandered off and he followed.

The land was flat and sun-beaten. Cherry moving across it was a rebellion, a refusal to acknowledge the feverish heat pressing down on them, thieving the moisture from their skin and the strength from their bodies.

She wove through the tall grasses ahead of him, the path whispering closed behind her so that he had to repart it at every step. He caught flickers of her between the wispy golden stalks, like a daylight ghost dancing on the dead air. A mirage, always out of reach. Impossible to act on, impossible to hold down.

            The twisting cherry trees solidified first, artificially bright leaves hanging limp under the heat-lamp sky, the shorter plum branches burdened low and heavy beneath bruise-colored fruit. The grass fell to his shoulder, his knee, then to chopped-off stubs poking through the dirt. They pricked the soles of his feet as he wove through the trunks and after Cherry, avoiding sun-baked pulp as he went.

The dropped plums seemed to have doubled since the morning, when their rot was still disguised under a veil of silvery damp. Exposed, they were blackened and bursting with their own insides, bleeding a sweet, necrotic ooze. Greedy, fatted flies bobbed through the air, diving for the fruit before resuming their drunken flight. He watched as one paused, probed, drank deeply, looking like a blood vessel about to burst. He wondered if it could taste what it was taking, if it liked it or was too starved to care.

Cherry was ahead of him, sizing up a tree. She hiked her leg up the trunk and he saw bruises on her shins and knees and stretching up to paint her thighs, set off by the old scratches of thorn tendrils and the newly inflamed cross-hatching where the plum bark scraped at her skin. She looked wild, marked-up, as if the world had taken hold of her and dragged her around a little instead of merely allowing her to trip through it like everybody else.

            She hoisted herself higher and flopped onto a sturdy, half-shaded branch, panting and wetting her cracked lips. Her legs dangled in front of him as he followed her up. She swung one at him and missed. The hem of her dress was stained with pond water; he watched the cotton edge of her underthings beneath it and wanted to run his hand up her skin.

“Maybe I should meet your father,” he said.

She sat up as he reached her, in his face.

“No.”

            She dropped her damp cheek against his shoulder and bit his collarbone. All at once he wanted to shove her. Away. Down. On her back. He didn’t know. He wanted to grab her leg and pull, to send her plummeting through the branches, to watch her hit the ground like the gnawed-on pits they’d thrown that morning. He wanted to bite her calf, her thigh, higher. He wanted to disappear into the tall grasses, to escape her hungry, searching mouth.

She was always biting. Grazing his ear, teasing his finger. Sometimes, he hated her.

Once, they’d been lying by the pond, limbs splayed over the cracked mud, crushing a flat, boy-and-girl-shaped patch among the tall grass, when without warning, she’d rolled up on her side and sunk her teeth into his bicep, keeping them fixed there as he yelped and she stared up at him with a trance in her eyes. Usually, she bit him while they were stuck together with their own salt, when she would nuzzle under his chin or find the tender flesh beneath his ear, as if she was trying to bury herself in the layers of his skin. He’d feel her sweet breath, a prick of canines; finding her mark, burrowing in.

“He wouldn’t want to meet you,” she said, unfastening her teeth.

There was a fresh mark on her knee. He watched as the joint bent and stretched beneath pinkish skin.

“Hey.”

“Really.”

“I’m not so bad.”

“Exactly.” She kept her cheek against his shoulder and wove her fingers through his, like grasses tangled together in the sweeping, lifeless wind.

Cherry was late, the sun nearly at its summit by the time she emerged through the field, fresh scratches on her knees from the greedy, groping thorn thickets above the orchard. She held a battered milk jug filled with some dark liquid, runnels of dried-up purple cutting lines down the plastic. She grinned, holding the jug aloft, and her eyeteeth seemed to wink at him.

“What is it?”

“Plum wine,” she said, squatting and unscrewing the cap.

“Your father’s?”

“Not anymore.”

She looked away, and he wondered if she was afraid. He watched her throat bob as she pulled a long swallow from the grimy plastic and then passed it to him.

He abandoned his usual noontime post on the bank and they waded through the pond for hours, tossing the jug back and forth and throwing mucky water in each other’s shrieking faces until Cherry’s shoulders and cheeks grew bright with sunburn and she left him for the shade of a pond-side tree. He lingered, standing thigh-deep in the stirred-up water, watching mud swirl from its bed to stain his fingertips. He thought of Cherry’s spattered dress, of her bruised thighs, of her bare, blistered shoulders.

He staggered from the pond and cut a crooked path toward her.

“You’re drunk as a skunk.” Her grin was lazy, her eyes unfocused.

He nodded, standing over her, knowing something she didn’t: he had already been drunk. On the hot air and endless skies, on the middle of nowhereness, on the whispering grasses and the maw of the depleted pond bed. He was drunk on the girl in front of him.

His skin was trapping heat, pooling it. He was too full of her, too full of ideas, bloated and stupid with them. He felt nauseous, as if he would be sick if he didn’t touch her, and it was only ever going to get worse.

Cherry slouched low against the bark in front of him, her hair caught up in the rough seams above her head, forming a mangled, gingery halo. He lowered himself unsteadily into her lap, resting heavy in the junction of her broken-doll legs. He let his chin fall against her navel. Stared up at her. Said nothing. Felt like he was begging. Fermented plum stained her lips. A rivulet of wine trailed over her jaw. He licked it. She giggled and licked him back, leaving a sour film over his mouth. She took another gulp from the jug and fell back against the tree.

He was dreaming, hallucinating. She was right in front of him—beneath him—but somehow distant and untouchable, slippery and blush-bright and full of teeth. When she bit him, at least, he knew she was real, that they existed on the same corporeal plane. But she wasn’t biting him now, only sitting quietly, watching some faraway wisp of grass or bit of dust as she let her fingers fall absently through his matted hair.

“D’you ever just want…” Her words slurred and she trailed off. A minute passed before she picked up again, as if she’d rediscovered the thought while rifling through some attic of her mind, dusted it off, and stuck it back in her mouth. “D’you ever want a soft sort of world?”

“What?” He was watching her lips, feeling her heat. His brain felt like the steam of breath on glass, fuzzy and barely there.

“Dunno.” She stretched a hand up in front of them. There was a shadowy stripe over her knuckles. “Just sit with me, I guess. Please.”

He felt like there was a current leaping beneath his skin. He didn’t want to sit. He wanted to roll her over in the dust, to squeeze her hard enough that he could keep himself from bursting, from cracking open and spilling out.

He tried to pull himself up, to reach for her, but she drew back and slid from beneath him and disappeared into the fizzing, static-filled hum of the grass. He stared up at the sky, his entire body heated and aching and too heavy to find her. The abandoned jug lay beside him, caked with pond scum and holding the last of their sun-spoiled wine.

It was days before he saw her again. He waited, watching the mornings disappear under the plum trees. She was not there to wade through the pond at noon and so he stayed in the orchards to watch the flies wade instead, through sour nectar and decaying fruit flesh. He stayed even when his head began to ache with thirst, even when the flies landed on him and lapped at his sweat. Only in the evenings did he rise and go to the water, sitting defeated along its edge, filling the stolen jug and soothing his throbbing skull.

Nearly a week had passed when she appeared in the night, across the water, like a will-o’-the-wisp come to lead him astray. Instead she crossed to him, circling the bank to his perch on the cooling mud. The moon was full and high and its light gave the pond the sharp shine of a knife’s edge, the water somehow alive as it never was during the long, flat days.

“Hey there,” she whispered, unsteady.

He rose to meet her and she slipped her hand into his. He pulled back. She moved forward, trapping him in the cage of her arms, and she must have felt his stiffness but she hid her face in his neck anyways and softly bit the skin there.

The blow came like a crack of summer lightning, the impact snapping her head back and radiating up his hand. He had never been sure before if her father hit her, but he was now. He could see it in the way she was quiet, in the way her eyes met his with an unexpectant dullness, even though he was still humming with the shock of the strike. It was in the way her lips formed around his name, even as her cheek bloomed dark as rotted, bloody plums. He turned to leave and she reached for him. Sealed them together like hot wax over a note, like a pact of sliced and oozing palms, like the saccharine, sticky death of an insect on honey. Her lips were coppery with blood; something inside her mouth was broken open and it flowed over his tongue. He sunk her low in the high, spindling grasses. The ground was cool against her back, against his palms as he leaned over her. Her hand was knotted in his hair. There was a cut over the height of her cheekbone, fresh shades of red and purple flowing out from it like the rings of the drying pond. She twisted her fist painfully against the nape of his neck and kissed him as if she were drinking from him, as if he was the one belly-up in the dirt.

Beneath the night, beneath the grass, beneath him, she solidified. She could be touched, she could be hurt. She could be had.

Her eyes were wide, wild, staring up at him. Afraid. Something barbed and weedy unfurled in his chest, something hateful. He forced her head back to bite the soft, sweet flesh of her throat, and she yelped.

The moon was sinking, carving a line down the night. Cherry’s dress was ripped and lying in the dirt somewhere above their heads. Her wrists were bruised, her throat littered with the imprint of his teeth. Her hands curled against his chest, fragile and transient as droplets tipping early-morning grass before they were scorched away. Instead of a soft love-blush, her cheek showed a deepening bruise. Dark patches marred the pale skin over her ribs and her left hip-bone, marks that he had not put there.

He held her tight, but thought about letting go, about tossing her into the mud and making her crawl back to him. But he would keep her, he thought, in the end. He would keep her where he wanted her, because she needed it, because he wanted it, because he could hurt what had been taught to hurt.

The moon abandoned them. As he watched, silver fingers tore open the sky, flooding the meadows, the orchards, the high grasses and the pond, pouring over the mass of their spilled and tangled bodies, all of it razor-bright and bristling with dew.

After I’d organized the container drawer, a mess of orphaned tops and bottoms, I recommended that Tammy toss all the plastic and replace it with glass. I researched where to buy it and sent her the link. She loved the initiative. That was the problem with their old housekeeper, she’d said. “She did the bare minimum, and even then, it was half-hearted.” I laughed because that’s what my mother had said about me. My modus operandi, as she’d called it, my whole view of the world, my dad jabbed, was a cross between half-assed and half-hearted.

Every week, I cleaned out something that wasn’t on the original checklist. I reorganized the linen closet, the basement shelves full of Christmas decorations and old paint cans, the kids’ closets full of broken hangers and candy wrappers. Until I found the note pinned to the fridge, asking me to remove all the food from the freezer and please prepare meals with anything that appeared “ready to die” and then another note the following week, “Can you check the ceiling fans in the kids’ rooms?” Who did she think she was?

They’d been paying me generously and I liked impressing them, but when she started listing things, the extra favours that once garnered surprise and gratitude, and the occasional twenty-dollar bill, had become part of the job.

I was watching YouTube videos sitting on their daughter Chelsey’s unmade bed when the idea came to me.

Unscrew the mounting bracket behind the bookshelves in Chelsey’s bedroom. Move books from the bottom to the top shelf.

Fifteen minutes before Tammy returns from Yoga, pull down shelf and crawl beneath the rubble of snow globes and books.

Scream for help when the front door opens.

Limp down the stairs and rest on the sofa for an hour until Joe gets home from work.

Refuse to visit the doctor, refuse to call the cleaning service, refuse to initiate any sort of paper trail because Tammy and Joe may not find another housekeeper willing to work in such an unsafe environment. The bookshelf hadn’t been installed properly. Call the contractor. No. Don’t call anyone, I’m fine, totally fine. I’ll be fine. Just let me rest.

It worked. I couldn’t believe it.

I texted Tammy during my first shift after the accident.

• I hope it’s okay that I didn’t finish the laundry.

I hate laundry.

• Don’t even worry about it.
• Would you mind if I work a half day next Tuesday?
• Of course.
• You won’t need to pay me, if that’s an issue.
• Not at all. We’ll pay you. Take all the time you need.
• I’m sure I’ll be right as rain by summer.
• Summer? Do you think it will be that long?
• Massage therapist said I tore my rotator cuff.
• Torn? Oh no. Poor Marina.
• I’ll be okay. I appreciate the support.

I haven’t folded a pair of Joe’s boxers in two years. Haven’t cleaned out a drawer. Now I work the half-hearted bare minimum and still get paid $40 more than they’d originally agreed for a six-hour day.

On Wednesdays, I clean Chuck and Bob’s condo. They pay me $200 for four hours of cleaning. Last year, a finishing nail mysteriously appeared out of the freshly installed hardwood floors. I sat in the emergency for eight hours to get a tetanus shot because I’d forgotten to consider the real implications of putting a nail through my foot.

On Fridays, I work for Nancy and Geoffrey, and I have no plans for a workplace injury. They never expect anything from me. I walk around their house every week for five hours with a dust cloth and a half-filled bucket of tepid soapy water, and they pay me $150.

I’d been trying to fill my Thursdays for a few months, but none of the clients worked out. When my boss Tatyana recommended Hugh, I worried that another divorced man who works from home, whose kids visited on the weekends, meant that I’d have to wash his dishes and pick up dirty clothes from the floor. I do not like touching dirty underwear. I’d rather sweep them into a bin. Cleaning up before I get down to cleaning up takes up a lot of time. I told Tatyana that I’d do a three-clean test-run.

Turns out Hugh is not your average divorced dad. Hugh spends an hour on the stationary bicycle in the morning and when he finishes eating his lunch, he cleans his own dishes. Hugh dresses in a suit and tie every day. Hugh has a place for everything. Every shelf is built-in, the hardwood floors pristine, the cleaning supplies environmentally friendly, which means I could drink them and still not be able to claim exposure to toxins. It means he’d know if anything had been moved or modified, if anything went missing. It was the easiest job ever, but without an opportunity to make it even easier, it started to feel like hard work.

After a few cleans, I called my boss.

• Tat, I can’t work for this guy. Can I get another family in Rosedale?
• You’re all I’ve got. Nobody wants to work for him.
• Why? This place is the easiest job I’ve ever had.
• I don’t know, but nobody lasts more than three months before they leave, as in they quit the company. Isa moved back to Chile for fuck sakes.
• He doesn’t need a cleaner. The guy cleans the house before I get here. This morning the hardwood floors were still wet.
• Are you calling me from his house?
• He’s on a call. He can’t hear me.
• You shouldn’t be using your phone on a job.
• Sure, Tat.
• I mean it. Tammy and Joe sent in a complaint last week. Said you stopped cleaning their daughter’s bedroom.
• They did what?

I told Joe a couple of months ago that it was triggering to go into Chelsey’s room and clean the same shelf they’d re-secured to the wall. Now, they’re complaining about me?

“Good morning. Sorry.” I tuck the phone into my back pocket after ending the call with Tatyana.

“That’s okay. I’m not one of those employers who cares about that. You can talk on the phone all day, if you want.” Hugh sips his smoothie, rubbing the back of his neck and stretching his shoulder muscles.

“I’m almost done here.” I roll the last pair of socks and toss it into the laundry basket. “Do you want me to put this away?”

“No that’s fine. I was wondering if you could do two days next week?”
“Two days?”

“I’d like the refrigerator cleaned out, and the stove. Is that too much?”

Here we go. I knew this was too good to be true. It’s been two months. I guess this is where it starts. All the cleaners probably quit when his nit-pickiness jumped into high gear. He doesn’t know I’m wily. I’ll find a way of getting out of things like cleaning the stove. I hate cleaning the stove more than I hate folding his fifty-dollar-boxers.

“Sure. No problem,” I say, “My hourly goes up a bit for jobs like that, but don’t tell Tatyana. She’ll take a cut and it’s not like she’s doing the work.”

“I completely understand.”

“If you want me to clean the basement, let me know.”

The basement might be where I’ll find my workplace injury.

“I hire a special cleaner for that.” Weird. He appears nervous and embarrassed about the basement.

“I can always add it to my regular day. Tatyana doesn’t need to know.”

“Thanks for the offer.” He tugs at the tie and unbuttons the top of his shirt. He’s got the body of a marathon runner, lean and a bit gaunt. Not my type, as if he’d ever consider a woman like me. I’m a solid size 14 but occasionally squeeze myself into a size 12 and this guy wears small boxer briefs under a 38 Tall suit.

“I noticed the kids’ rooms haven’t been slept in.”

He stares at me for a few minutes because of course it’s none of my business but I’d rather not wash and change clean sheets on two twin beds pushed against the walls.

“Their mother moved to Montreal,” he says, “They’ll come live with me in the summer.”

If there’s going to be two teenagers here all summer, I will not be doing their laundry. I’ve got a few months to figure out how to get out of this.

“Tatyana mentioned your family lives in, Florida, is it?” I don’t usually care about family history, but it’s always weird to think about an American moving here, to a bungalow in Etobicoke.

“Cleveland, actually.”

“Cool. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

“Never been.” He untucks his shirt and removes his belt. For a second I think he’s going to undress in front of me.

“Parents still alive?”

“Both still working.” His abdomen is a topographical map of manly perfection.

My parents still live in our seven-bedroom house in Rothesay, New Brunswick. When I stopped going to school, they threatened to board me at Netherwood for high school, I forged another one of my mother’s cheques and moved to Toronto with ten grand. I called them from Montreal. They said that I’d never see a penny from the trust until I paid them back.

“What about you, Marina? Parents? siblings?”

“Why do you ask?” What the hell business is it of his what my brothers are doing right now. Would it help him to know they blocked me on Instagram?

“I just like to know what ties people to the world, you know,” Hugh says.

“What does that mean?” I ask. He steps into the laundry room and exits wearing running shorts and a t-shirt. It’s the middle of March, probably 5 degrees outside.

“Family is everything, right? Without family, even if they’re friends who are like family, what do we have to keep us here?”

“You mean, alive? Like family is what keeps us from leaping off a bridge.”

“I guess so. Existentially, we’re here to matter to other people, to make other people feel like they matter.” His earnest smile as he slowly says, matter.

I am not in the mood for a conversation about why I don’t matter to anyone. I’ve already missed my streetcar. “I thought I was here to clean your house.” I smile right back.

He reaches inside his shorts to adjust himself before he pulls his ankle up to his butt to stretch his quads. “I just mean, why are we here?” He reaches for the smoothie on the kitchen counter.

“On the planet?” I pucker my lips while he drinks the liquified grass.

“Human beings? Why are we here? You should know, I’m an atheist,” he says, “Sorry if you believe in God.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

I don’t believe in anything, I want to say, but this guy clearly believes in something, and I don’t want to hear what it is.

“God is a waste of time, and real unhappiness exists with or without him.” He swallows the last of the grass.

“I don’t know. Tat believes in God, goes to church and everything, and I’ve never known anyone happier than her.”

“I bet that’s not true.” He swings his leg down, shaking his foot around before pulling up the other ankle.

“I’m not close with my family.” I don’t know why I say it, but it’s like he’s a priest or something. The words fall out of me.

“I didn’t think so. You’ve only got an Instagram account, where you have six followers and

you’re following nobody. You might be the only 26-year-old without social media.”

How does he know all this? “I just watch YouTube and TikTok.”

“I couldn’t find, Marina, DelRay is it? Not on TikTok.” he says.

My TikTok links back to my real name. Why is this guy looking me up?

“I’m on there,” I say.

“What’s your name?”

“Pardon?”

“On TikTok. What’s your handle?” He tosses out the words like he doesn’t care about the answer.

“I don’t really want the people I work with to see, my personal life.” I carry the laundry basket to his bedroom, and he follows me.

“I can put that away.” He stretches his neck by pulling his face into his armpit.

“I’ve gotta go. See you next week.”

“Can you come on Monday?” he asks.

Does he know that’s my day off? That I never work Mondays?

“Can I let you know?”

“I’d rather know now. Otherwise, I have to hire somebody else.”

Somebody else? Is this why people quit because he tells them they have to work two days or be replaced? Because he starts stalking them on social media like some kind of psycho?

“Sure. See you Monday.”

“Great.” He leaves before me, and I watch him out the living room window as he jogs across the street.

I immediately go through his drawers looking for something to steal. If I can’t figure out a plausible workplace injury, I’m going to leave here today with something. The remote control to the television! Brilliant. He’ll come home after his run and want to turn on the news or sports or whatever he watches, and he won’t be able to. I go out to the living room and open the skinny drawers in the wall-to-wall cabinet searching for the clicker. I get down on my hands and knees and reach under the sectional, waving back and forth like a windshield wiper. Finally, I check behind the wall-mounted screen and there it is, attached to the back of the television with Velcro. Of course, he’d have it in a spot where he’d never lose it.

Instead of that, I take the Miyabi chef’s knife. It fits diagonally in my fanny pack.

Before I have my shoes tied, the front door opens.

“You still here?”

“Ya, sorry. I forgot to vacuum the carpets in the kids’ rooms.” A believable excuse given I’m sweating from searching for the remote and those rooms never get dirty.

He knows I’m lying. It’s the same face my dad had any time I came home drunk or high.

“Can I show you something?” He removes his t-shirt and opens the door to the basement.

“I honestly have to run. I’ve got a date with a friend.”

“I know that’s not true. Corinna.”

“Corinna?” I swallow my birth name like it’s an entire supermarket dinner roll. Maybe he didn’t say it.

“I know you have no friends. I know you go home every day and watch pirated television shows on your laptop. I know your other clients, Tammy and Joe, have been trying to figure out a way to fire you and that Nancy and Geoff feel sorry for you. What did Geoff say? He said watching you walk around their house like an idiot toddler is their way of paying it forward. Charity. They have another cleaner who comes on Saturdays to clean what you didn’t clean. Charles and Robert are afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me?” I turn the fanny pack around and rest my hand on the zipper.

“Yes. Robert thinks you might be a bit.” Hugh circles the side of his head with his index finger.

“They think I’m crazy?”

“You don’t leave a good impression on people.” Hugh removes his shorts. As he turns toward the bedroom, I lunge for the front door.

I’m fiddling with the lock when he comes up behind me.

“I can’t open the door.”

“It’s locked from the inside,” he says, “Come with me.” He grips my hands and drags me to the top of the basement stairs.

I open my fanny pack, but I know there’s no way I can get a good swing from this angle, and I know psychopaths, if you hurt them, they just get mad, and all this, whatever he has planned for me, will be worse.

“I’m just like you,” I say. Like if he knows that I’m a bad person, a schemer, a fucking liar, as my mother once called me, maybe Hugh will let me go. What pleasure will he get from murdering me? I have nobody who’ll care I’m dead.

Hugh doesn’t hear me.

“It’s not about how you live or how you die, but how you will be remembered.”

Is he suggesting that my life will only have meaning now as a murder victim?

“Ho-leee, shit.” An entire wall in the basement is covered in photos of me, drone shots of me walking on my street, paparazzi style photos of me drinking coffee on the bench across from the park. I’d started watching the nannies with the kids, keeping them on their toes with a few photos here and there. There are screenshots of the stupid TikTok videos I made cleaning everything with baking soda and vinegar. I thought I could make some money, pay back my parents, go home for Christmas.

“How does this make you feel?” Hugh asks.

“Like you’re a psycho who’s going to kill me, but for some weird reason wants me to see how big a loser I am first.”

“That’s not what’s happening here.” He places me in a rolling office chair and pushes me to a big screen. He lifts a remote control, and it comes to life. I see my birth certificate, a picture of my mom crying with a bloody-freshly-birthed version of me on her chest, a photo of my dad crying, staring down at a swaddled baby. Me. The images that come across the screen are all of me at various stages of my life.

“Do you see this girl?” An image of me at thirteen. Mr. Paterson, the vice-principal thought it was a good idea to create a board of shame and any student who acted out – or who accidentally tripped the most popular girl in school throwing her into the open door of a school bus causing her to lose two of the front teeth that her parents had paid thousands to straighten – had their photo taken in front of a height indicator he’d painted on the wall in his office. That mugshot had been pinned to the corkboard in the front foyer of the school for two years.

“She looks cool,” I say. I doubt my sarcasm is going to get me anywhere today. I laugh because maybe Mr. Paterson was right. One of these days, young lady, that smart mouth of yours is going land you in a heap of trouble. 

“What’s so funny, CoCo?” Hugh says it like he knows the truth, like he knows what’ll happen when I hear it.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I just need your attention.”

“I’m Marina. Not CoCo.”

Hugh sits in another rolling office chair and pulls himself close to me. My hands are shaking because this is it, this is my only chance. I feel it. I push my chair back and reach inside the fanny pack.

He doesn’t see it coming because he’s now focused on a yellow file folder. More photos, more proof of the half-assed, half-hearted life I lived before coming to Toronto. Do I tell Hugh I’m a worthless piece of shit who won’t be missed by anybody? Does that matter? He’ll probably send Tatyana a text message from my phone saying that I quit and he’ll have added another body to his count.

He grips his neck. The blood comes out like the fountain at the park, and I can’t believe I actually got him in the good spot. The jugular.

“Holy shit.” I run up the stairs. He’s gargling words and stumbling after me.

I lock the basement door. At the sink, I clean the knife. I spray it with bleach cleaner.

“I have to take this with me, what am I doing?” I should call the cops. I know I should call the cops. But I’m freaking out. I put the knife back in my fanny pack. At least it’s clean. They won’t find evidence of it. I remove the Swiffer mop from the front hall closet and spray and wipe the floors around the basement door.

I finally stop running at the park. On the bench, catching my breath, which I think is probably still in that basement because it takes so long, I worry I might pass out and one of the nannies will find me here, the knife in my pack. I need to throw it in the creek. He was going to kill me.

I open my phone, press 9-1-1, and look at the clean knife on my lap. I breathe in and out through my nose. I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I might scream. I drop my phone and pick it up. I need to call Tatyana. I can’t get my fingers on the right icons.

Finally.

“Tat. What the actual fuck?”

“Marina. What’s wrong? Is it Hugh?”

“Oh. My Gawd.”

Why did I call Tatyana? I can’t tell her I just killed a client. I can’t be the one to tell her that there might be more bodies buried in his bungalow basement.

“What’s going on?”

“Who else worked for Hugh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who worked and then quit?”

“Shannell, Halina, and Isa. Why?”

I have their numbers. I hang up and call Shannell. The number has been disconnected. I call Halina. It rings. I’m about to hang up when someone answers. They don’t say hello. Does Hugh have Halina’s phone? Is he still alive in that basement? I hang up.

In my apartment, I pack up my clothes. I wrap my Beatrix Potter cup and a musical Peter Rabbit. There are shelves of these figurines at home in New Brunswick. These were the only two pieces I packed ten years ago. I want to go home.

My phone rings. It’s Halina’s phone number, but I know it’s not her. I ignore it.

At Union Station, I have my backpack, the fanny pack with the knife still inside, and my mother’s rolling suitcase. My phone pings. Why do I still have my phone?

A text message:

• You trying to call me?
• Who is this?
• You called me 2 hours ago.
• Halina?
• Yes!!!!
• You’re alive?
• WTF are you talking about?
• Where r u? Have you heard from Shannell? Isa?
• We don’t talk, but I think Shannell moved to the States and Isa’s in Chile with her sister.
• You know that for sure?
• Pretty sure.

Damn.

• How’d you like working for Hugh?

How does she know that? I attach a thumbs up to her comment. Is this Hugh? Is he still alive?

• Get you to the basement yet?
• No. Why?
• I won’t spoil the surprise. If you’re still there after three months, he’s going to change your life.
• How?
• From what I heard, he paid for Isa to fly to Chile. Gave her enough money to open a bookstore.

The train pulls into the station. I call her phone.

“What do you mean he paid for Isa to fly home?”

“He’s a philanthropist. Like a billionaire,” she says.

“Why does he live in a bungalow in Long Branch?”

“He sold some tech business, Shannell said he became a certified life coach, a spiritual guru or something. He researched the hell out of me. Knew my middle name and the name of my elementary school teachers. Freaked me out a bit.”

“For sure. That would freak me out, too. Psycho killer stuff.”

“Right. Anyway. He told me I should be a lawyer, and guess what? I hired a tutor to write my LCATS and I passed. I’m applying to law schools. And the kicker? He’s going to pay for it. I don’t even have to pay him back.”

“He’s going to pay for it?”

“Ya.”

“He didn’t give you the money yet?”

I cling to the hope that he’s still a psycho killer.

“No. I didn’t want the money up front like Isa. He gave me a choice. Get paid monthly, and have my tuition covered, or take a hundred grand.”

“Shit.”

“Shit what?”

“Halina, I have to go. My train’s here.”

Instead of getting on the train to Montreal, I walk downstairs and head over to the Lakeshore West platform.

A woman wearing a chef’s jacket stands on Hugh’s lawn screaming into the phone, “He’s dead.”

The front door is open, and the woman walks along the sidewalk like if she moves farther away from the house, Hugh won’t be dead. She’ll be looking for her knife. I leave my stuff behind a tree and walk up to the front door and straight through like I’m supposed to be there. I disappear downstairs and just as I get to the bottom step, I hear someone say, “Corinna?” The chef knows about me?

I step over Hugh’s body and lift the file folder. I just need to find out what he had planned. What future had he chosen for me? The chef grips my shoulder.

Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? What did he see that might be worth anything?

– end –

After months of confusing applications and automated interviews an offer finally came in. They were a small, nonprofit team working off grant funding to study how wildlife adapted to climate change in urban environments. They needed someone to transcribe a year and half worth of field notes the rest of the team was too busy to deal with. The contract was only for six months and not very well paid, but no questions were asked about the twelve year gap on Claudia’s resume or her lack of science background. They only told her not to worry about dressing up when she started on Monday.

Claudia still arrived wearing the only dress slacks she owned that still fit right and old dress shoes that clicked loudly as she walked. She rode the train, something she hadn’t done alone in a number of years. People rushed around her, going this way and that. Elbows of blazers and wafts of strong cologne blended together and she got off with the flow, letting herself be carried up and out of the station into a new stream of strangers. She walked through an old, cement neighborhood filled with old, cement buildings. Inside of one, she clicked her way across an art deco floor made of polished tiles and was greeted enthusiastically by two people who looked somewhat out of place among the lobby chandeliers.

Jewel and Lenard were the lead researchers. The two of them nearly matched in their faded jeans and sneakers, graying ponytails frizzing at the tops. They all traveled upstairs where the elevator wobbled at the top and opened to a dark attic space covered in wooden paneling and steely exposed tubes. The echoing of air being pushed through along with the creaking and clicking of wood and Claudia’s shoes overshadowed the brief tour where Lenard pointed where each shadowed, labyrinthine hallway led to, but she nodded along anyway. They ended at an alcove filled with makeshift computer desks and small windows, flooding the dusty space with a soft light. Her space was set up along a wall with a boxy donor laptop and metal, folding chair piled high with notebooks and accordion folders. They left her to get settled without much fanfare and Claudia shifted the pile to the floor next to her. She grabbed the top notebook and flipped it open.

The drawing that greeted her was done in pen, stains that looked like raindrops blurred the angles of a bird’s wing. A beak bled through the page underneath. Talons, eyes, feathers were all drawn in close detail. The figures were accompanied by smudges of lost observations. She flipped through the book and tried another one. Similar scribbles of messy pen greeted her. Book after book offered only the same, undeniable circumstance. It was all pigeons.

How they nested, traveled, mated, ate, lived among city residents was laid out across notebook after musty notebook and folders of scribbled writings and hand drawn diagrams. Claudia looked around her desk. No one was watching her. If she got up and left right now no one would likely notice, she hadn’t even signed any paperwork yet. Because while Claudia could deal with a dark, attic of an office and waking up at the crack of dawn to pack lunches for her and Ben before an hour and half commute into this dirty, industrial maze, she could not deal with pigeons.

She’d always hated them. Their loud flapping and inability to respect personal space had always elicited the same panicked sprinting as far back as she remembered. The way they sounded, their germs, their pointy little bird faces, all of it horrible. Claudia spared another glance around. She still had no idea what she was supposed to do with all these notes and their smudged, indecipherable handwriting and no one else around seemed to care about that.

The whole team appeared to work out of the same small area. Claudia only caught flaps of arms and backs with names rattled off too fast to catch, she thought maybe there were five of them. She desperately tried to memorize any defining features, but the haze of rumpled, untucked shirts on long-haired men and hiking pants might as well have been copied and pasted across each one of the bodies that flew by. None of them had even spared her a nod.

            “Don’t mind them,” Jewel said. Claudia realized she was at a desk station across the small space from her. “Feathers are just a little ruffled around here with our deadlines looming.”

            Claudia nodded. She half debated excusing herself to the bathroom and running but she didn’t remember where the bathroom was. Claudia turned back to the notebook she’d opened with Jewel still looking on encouragingly, reading the top most notes describing how pigeons appeared to be built well for evading buildings and fast moving vehicles. They were fast themselves and sturdy, apparently keeping them out of more trouble than other urban species, or so the notes highlighted with a hefty underline and a few question marks. Claudia read on with the image of a large pigeon swooping down, wings spread, beak open, and talons poised for attack stuck in her head on a loop. She read assuming she would stop when someone came to tell her what to do and ended up reading until everyone else packed up for home. She followed them, adrift, and marked where the bathroom was on her way out.

            And Claudia returned the next day, only getting a little lost on the way up. She was greeted by Lenard slapping an onboarding form on her desk and giving a quick rundown on the master document she’d be adding research notes to under pre established tabs of different categories. All the software was unfamiliar but Claudia nodded along. He recommended they schedule weekly meetings to check in on her progress and told Claudia to book some time on their digital calendars. After struggling to figure out how to locate his own schedule she saw he was fully booked for weeks out and turned back to the notebook pile instead.

Hesitantly, she opened one and began to type what she saw. Pigeons were small. Pigeon feathers were water resistant. Those could go under physical attributes. Gross and dirty would also suffice. Pigeons were territorial, that could go under behavior. Pigeons were freaky with little beady bird eyes. Claudia typed and drifted. She would need to finish laundry when she got home, Ben’s shorts were stinking up the garage. They were almost out of eggs and sandwich bread too. Pigeons could extract food from narrow spaces by using their feet and beaks; that one came with a little drawing done in smudged pen of a pigeon’s clawed foot gripping a bag of potato chips.

Lenard appeared back beside her desk. “I can’t help but notice some creative interpretation on your end of things.”

“I thought I was meant to summarize?”

            “Only in instances of repetition. Try to keep to the words as they are written. If something is unclear just tag me in the document.”

            “Yes, of course,” she nodded. She wanted to ask him more questions. She’d wrote some down last night at home, alone in bed and unable to sleep. They were things like, Who do you all work for? What is this project for? What exactly is the point of all this? But Claudia couldn’t think of the right way to ask.

            “Do you always type like that?” Lenard pointed down to where her index and middle fingers were still hovering on the keyboard. He shook his head. “Anyways, just think of these field notebooks as a style guide and keep to that.”

            Claudia tried to ask what that meant, but he’d already walked away. She was alone again in her little corner, the window above her offering only a strip of bare gray sky. She began to type again. Pigeons weighed between 220g and 340g from birds lured onto a scale near State and Madison, average 227g. Birds weighed near the Riverwalk trailhead averaged closer to 330g. Did the river yield a more consistent food supply —whoever wrote these didn’t think so. Pigeons were not well suited for fishing but did seem to enjoy a swim. Claudia used to visit the Riverwalk with Ben, they frequented a wine bar one of his college friends owned. She always got nervous sitting outside in the evenings with all the pigeons that would circle the outdoor tables begging for scraps. They were everywhere. Claudia’s trip back to the train last night she had passed a flock of pigeons picking at someone’s abandoned takeout food. She had edged around them and ignored the stomach churning chorus of cooing and scuffling. Claudia had reminded herself they were fast and nimble enough to chase after her if she stepped on one accidentally.

The team invited Claudia out for drinks at the end of her first week. She agreed, bashful and excited as she trailed behind the group of hunched shoulders and crossbody bags. They all walked so quickly, perfectly in step with each other. Claudia was lost in the tailwinds and sped up to reach Jewel who was back a ways talking with Lenard. She reached them in time to see him scratch a hand across Jewel’s lower back, saying something that made her slap his shoulder and laugh. Claudia debated changing course but it was too late. Jewel saw her and swooped, linking their arms together and marching her away from Lenard towards the bar, half prize and half prisoner.

            Jewel did not let Claudia stray far for most of the night, ordering them a flight of fruity beers in little round glasses to share. Claudia had not drank beer in a long time. It had  improved since the days of her sharing a six pack of whatever Ben picked up at the store on his way home from work, back when the two of them lived in a small apartment in the city and were still in school. Jewel placed her hand on Claudia’s arm when she spoke and squeezed it when Claudia replied.

Someone else cracked a joke, Nish she thought, and Claudia laughed along without hearing it. She was slowly observing how to tell her flighty officemates apart. She catalogued who had a handsome nose and who wore the reddish glasses versus the gold, who bit their nails and whose wedding rings gleamed on hairy hands. Jewel wore her nails long, the slightly wrinkled skin on top of her hands dotted with freckles and bare, ringless fingers just like Claudia’s.

*

            When Jewel asked Claudia to step into her office one morning a couple weeks later she thought it was a joke, but then Jewel was leading them both through hallway after twisting hallway back past the out of order bathroom and to a closet that she opened, waving Claudia inside and shutting the door behind them. It was a spacious closet but still a closet, dusty wooden shelves empty aside from a couple boxes. A small window at the back was propped open with a door wedge stuck in it.

            “Lenard is always leaving this open,” Jewel said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extending one towards Claudia who just stared at it, her head tilted and shoulders stiff. “Not a smoker then,” Jewel laughed and put it away.

            Claudia stayed and watched Jewel light her cigarette, breathing in and exhaling smoke back out towards the window where it escaped in rivulets back into the sunny, stagnant air of downtown. Soft sounds of traffic poured inside and filled the silent, stale air between them. Claudia breathed carefully, afraid to cough or look too disgruntled. She could have left but it seemed like that time had come and passed so she stayed, rocking on her heels in the sneakers she’d swapped her dress shoes for that looked more like the ones Jewel wore. Ben had been a smoker when she first met him and always hated the way the bitter smell clung to his shirts. She wished she had something to do with her hands too.

Making up her mind at last, Claudia moved closer to the window to lean against it and heard soft cooing. Barely visible on the roof, pigeons were lined up under the window. They were basking in the sun, wings fluttering gently. Claudia jumped back.

            “What’s wrong?” Jewel asked.

            “Nothing, just some pigeons out there.”

            “Oh, yeah. They love this spot too. They’re creatures of habit, have you seen that in the notes? The same pigeons will return to their favorite resting spots over and over again regardless of weather or construction or anything.”

            “Hmm.” How many days had Claudia made the same path from bedroom to kitchen and back again or to back yard, to grocery store and back again? Enough to wear the carpet in her hallway down probably if she didn’t steam it regularly. Enough for there to be greasy spots on the handle of her fridge she always forgot to wipe away, and holes in the patio where she’d stand in the afternoon and watch her flower pots struggle to bloom. There was a bit less to do now, with Ben gone there were no longer coffee rings left on the counter. She still wiped it down out of habit.

            When Jewel was done smoking she offered Claudia a spritz of perfume to cover up the smell of smoke. Claudia nodded her thanks and Jewel crept close to spray her own wrist and pressed it to Claudia’s neck, one side and then the other.

            Now that Claudia knew to look she saw Jewel go back to the smoking closet frequently. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Lenard. She never disappeared for long and always came back smelling freshly of perfume.

Claudia started going back there by herself too. It was something to break up the endless scrawl of scratched out notes and marginal asides as she went through notebook after notebook, although she was disappointed when she arrived to find it empty. Two months had passed in a blink without much notice from Lenard or anyone else. Claudia’s days passed evenly. She packed lunch for her and Ben. She rode the train in and back home. She cooked dinner and tidied. She went to bed. Even this new commute soon became another easy, carpeted path.

She passed by more pigeons in a day than she’d ever really realized. The ones drawn over and over again in the field notes were fragmented, a wing here, a nostril cere there. That’s how she tried to see them in real life too. There was nothing scary about a foot. Pigeon’s leg muscles had evolved to be sturdier to keep up with human demand. Their powerful breasts perhaps emerged by preening under human guidance generation after generation for thousands of years. Pigeons today still strutted chest first, two different muscle fibers making up the largest and most important flight muscle. Their chests depressed the wings at the shoulder, where attached to the deltopectoral crest of the proximal humerus. Claudia tried to sit up straight in her desk chair and felt her own chest stretch, odd joints popping and cracking in a way they never did before.

            It was pouring rain and Claudia headed straight to the smoking closet when she saw Lenard leaning against her desk waiting on her. He had an annoying habit of checking on her progress first thing in the morning when he had to know she hadn’t started on anything yet. She clambered inside the closet, dripping from her jacket onto the floor. She pried open the closed window as far as it would go and peered out, balanced up on her toes making her rain boots squeak loudly.

The window led onto the roof, sun bleached concrete dark gray with the downpour. Another gray shape moved into her view. A soaking wet pigeon looked at her with a tilted head and sad bird eyes; a shiver coursed through its little bird body. Pigeons regulate their body temperature by tucking in their heads and feet. They have downy feathers that helped to insulate them, pulviplumes she believed they were called. Claudia thought of the birds she passed outside the train station, the ones huddling next to buildings to avoid the scuffle of feet and how she’d stopped shuddering away when they ruffled their feathers to settle. She thought of Ben in his little puffer coat all weighed down by water, drips pouring off his curly hair. How his cheeks used to get so red and how Claudia used to wrap a scarf around his neck before sending him off with a kiss.

            Claudia pointed at the window, “You want in?”

The bird shivered again.

Claudia reached her arm through the narrow space to try and beckon the bird inside. It backed up and puffed up its chest. Claudia pushed at the window harder and its old wooden latch snapped. She hauled the heavy glass pane up. “Here you go.”

            The pigeon hopped its way inside and Claudia dropped the window closed with a loud slam which must have alerted the bird to its new surroundings because it began flailing, squawking, and pooping all at once. It flew back at the window and banged its body against the glass.

            Claudia sprinted out of the closet, shutting the bird in behind her. She heard it yelling frantic bird calls in her absence. She shakily maneuvered back towards the office area where Jewel was now seated, tiny drops of rain clinging to the ends of her hair.

            “There’s, umm, a bird in the smoking closet,” Claudia said.

            “Really? How’d it get in?”

            Claudia shrugged.

            “Probably Lenard,” Jewel rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

            Claudia followed her back to the closet again. At first the bird was nowhere to be found, then Jewel spotted it wedged between a shelf and the wall. She tried to grab it, but the thing flapped its wings rapidly and growled an indignant, pigeony roar the closer she got. Jewel instructed Claudia to close the closet door and she did so, reluctantly.

            Jewel backed up and squatted down while Claudia pressed herself back against the door, hand poised to open it and run if she needed to. Jewel opened her hands, arms half raised off to her sides. She cooed at the bird, softening her voice into a low drone that washed over the closet, barely audible over the rainstorm.

The pigeon stopped fighting, cranking its head and bowing instead.

Jewel returned the gesture, bowing low and popping her shoulders up like wings. Her chest came next as she rolled her body back up, cooing louder. She twisted her head side to side stepping forward.

The pigeon shook itself loose and hopped down onto the floor. The two of them closed in, circling each other as Jewel whispered, “Go open the window,” just before she lunged and grabbed the bird, closing one hand around its head and another around its middle.

Claudia ran over and shoved the window open. As she did, Jewel reached out and thrust the bird out of her grip, pulling Claudia’s hands out of the way as the glass dropped closed again. Back outside, the pigeon squawked indignantly then shook itself off and flew away.

“There, that wasn’t so hard,” Jewel wiped her hands on her pants.

“What was that?”

“Mating signals,” she explained. “Typically a male initiates but more aggressive females can as well. There’s actually a lot of homosexual coupling in feral pigeon populations, I mean, you’ve seen the notes. The dance is all in the neck and chest. They puff up like this,” she rolled her shoulders back again, stretching her neck out to the other side. “And the bowing and shaking comes with a song they sing to each other.”

Jewel dropped down again, shaking her head slowly, her still damp hair flopping about her shoulders. Claudia dropped as well, trying to mimic her movements. She felt stiff and awkward, pulsing out her shoulders in disjointed movements. She braced her hands on her thighs to rise back up and stop, but then Jewel strutted forward, bowing her head down, waiting for Claudia to reply.

She did, stepping forward again and ducking her head down still in her pigeon squat. Claudia’s head was almost in the other woman’s neck, their feet slotted together like a dance. She could smell Jewel’s perfume, felt some of her hair curled from the rain gently brushing her cheek.

Jewel’s lips pursed as she made a soft cooing sound. Claudia leaned closer to copy her, tilting her head and cooing right back against her ear. Jewel placed her arms on Claudia’s shoulders and squeezed gently, her thumbs rubbing over the fabric of her shirt. Claudia bowed her head low one last time in a nod and Jewel turned. She pressed their lips together, soft pigeon sounds getting lost between them.

*

            Jewel and Claudia made cooing noises at each other from their desks when no one else was paying attention. Claudia worked quicker now, her eyes had grown used to the styles of handwriting and the transition from reading to typing. She was only interrupted by frazzled clucking of the others searching in her pile for something they needed or by Lenard swinging by her desk periodically to question why she’d put all the notes about pigeon’s communally grooming each other into the behaviors area when it should clearly have gone with relationships. Claudia always heard him coming before she saw him. The shuffle of his feet and quiet muttering as he squabbled on his bluetooth gave him away.

Claudia knew there was something between Jewel and Lenard. It was the way they dragged each other off sometimes beyond the normal smoke break. They took lunch meetings out together and arrived at the same time almost each morning. Jewel hadn’t asked Claudia back with her to the smoking closet again and they had not been alone since the window incident some weeks ago. Only Lenard, who looked over Claudia’s shoulder, emailed her pages of edits to make and reminded her frequently to refer back to her ‘style guide’, was led off personally by Jewel.

After another morning watching Jewel and Lenard disappeared together, Claudia decided to take her lunch break outside. She circled the block and found a small park. More a smudge of green space and some benches but it was still nice. Pigeons were splashing away in a fountain, more running after each other in the grass clicking and chirping in a way that sounded like laughter. Ben and his friends used to run around in her yard like that. He used to lay on a blanket in the grass and read with her, and share peanut butter sandwiches. Claudia really needed to mow the lawn. She’d been reminding Ben to do it next time he came by but was close to giving up hope on that. A couple of pigeons approached where Claudia sat and stared at her with their beady bird eyes. She cringed back.

Feral pigeons demonstrated the highest intelligence for social cues both within their own familiar units and when interacting with birds of other colonies. Claudia had never realized pigeons had colonies, or families as some of the notebooks called them. Pigeons were tightly knit creatures, returning not just to the same places but the same flocks season after season. They mated for life. They raised their young communally.

Claudia wondered where the birds went when they couldn’t be at home. Did they miss each other when they were away? Did pigeons dream about old friends? Make plans for pigeon family vacations? Did they feel sorry when they’d disappointed one another? Claudia stood and the bird closest staggered back, chest puffing up and wings beating. She almost apologized for startling it.

When she was left alone, her work wasn’t all that bad. Four and a half months had flown by. Every day was a repetitive read, type, click click click, brainless work that allowed Claudia to forget about the pigeons as best she could. It was easier than she anticipated to focus instead on words as standalone clumps of letters and waterlogged handwriting. Pigeons have been noted with higher success in adapting their diets. The proventriculus glandular part of their stomach rested around a 4.8 ph level. They were able to eat larger amounts of refined grain and processed food items without getting sick. Pigeons enjoyed a grain and legume based diet which matches up to the urban scraps of human food waste many of them sufficed on. They stored excess food in their crop sac for conserving nutrients or to give to their young, crop milk. Claudia really needed to buy milk. She needed to do laundry again too. Ben had shrunken her nice sweater when she’d asked him to handle it last time. She’d even shown him how all the buttons worked.

Claudia started taking all her lunch breaks in the park. She tossed most of her corn chips away to the fountain pigeons, unsalted of course. She delighted in how they all returned to her for more, longing for her to notice them, nurture them. They cooed at her and bowed their heads. She ducked her own back and hoped they’d reached an understanding.

Claudia couldn’t help but notice it one day as she ascended to the attic with one month left on her contract. She’d come to view the space as her own little roost, up high and plenty of nooks and crannies to cuddle up away from the elements or any predators. And once she put it all together she couldn’t help but laugh, loudly, right at her desk drawing an unimpressed glare from Lenard across their cluttered alcove.

Her coworkers’ gray, mottled heads bobbed in agreement with whatever Lenard was saying. Her coworkers, gray molting pigeons with their receding hairlines, who nested with their stacks of books and overheating computers. Each one of them was an arm-flapping, shoulder-stretching squabbling bird running back and forth all day ignoring any questions she had or emailing her passive aggressive comments about keeping her spreadsheets tidy.

When Lenard prattled on to her later about editing one thing or another, all Claudia saw was a large pigeon, gray remiges all puffed up and little glasses perched on pale ceres. Claudia pressed fingers into her temples and flexed her fingers sore from typing. She listened to the flutter of academics pecking at each other and daydreamed about throwing french fries and watching them scatter.

*

Pigeons came in more colors than Claudia ever realized as she spent a day scanning and archiving a pile of photos, a favor Jewel had asked with a kiss to the top of Claudia’s head when she agreed. Pigeons were not only grime-matted gray but blue, green, and purple. She noted the rainbow of them on her walk back to the train. Jewel too, favored these colors and the scent of her perfume had lingered on Claudia’s sleeve all the way home.

Jewel hadn’t been around as much, their conversations limited to her runs between meetings outside the little alcove. Jewel always left with a lingering hand squeeze, a comforting scratch across the shoulders. Claudia wondered if maybe she was just a very affectionate person, Ben had a cousin like that. She looked over at Jewel’s empty desk.

Claudia noticed how the sun caught on a pigeon’s tailfeathers, the bright green hue of it. Pigeons’ beaks have been getting longer over time and so have their legs. To better rifle through trash or maybe to fight or flee as different accounts had hypothesized. The pigeons Claudia passed outside walked down the streets, heads held high, defiant in their rhythm as they circled ankles and dodged purses.

Pigeons related to each other verbally and physically, each vocalization a signifier to a world of meaning that Claudia could swear she was able to tell apart now that she was listening. A growling rumble when a bird got too close to someone else’s lunch. A soft purr to a friend to check in. Pigeons must have ways of greeting each other, there was nothing to differentiate a friend from a lover in the notes. What was the right caw for, Hello, how was your day? How are you? Claudia cannot remember the last time she had any such conversation with someone. Only Jewel, who hummed at her when she saw Claudia stretching out her shoulders at her desk. She came behind her with warm, perfumed hands and offered to rub them for her, pressed in with strong fingers and clicked her tongue at her. Claudia couldn’t find it in herself to ask if she’d had lunch already, only cooed back in thanks, bowed her head to let her work.

Jewel was the only calm one among the cast of unruly birds. Unflappable, she languished at her desk, occasionally putting in headphones for video meetings where she said nearly nothing but nodded intently. She filed her nails habitually. She ordered the others around in her pigeon-toed orthopedic sneakers, tapping her feet all day under her desk like she’d rather be somewhere else.

Claudia finally invited her out on a walk around the park. She’d packed an extra sandwich so they could eat together by the fountain. She’d practiced at home, tilting her head and popping her shoulders, humming under her breath and twitching her chin. Feral city pigeons copulated on a less strict schedule than wild birds, spring and fall mating seasons mere suggestions of how to pass the time. Pigeon birth rates have only increased through urbanization. There were two pigeons together in the fountain when Claudia and Jewel took their seats, the rest of the birds scattered about, some watching and tittering and others pecking at the ground.

Jewel declined the sandwich, citing a gluten allergy Claudia hadn’t known about. Claudia ate hers quietly, cycling through thoughts of interesting conversation. She’d like to know what Jewel went to school for, what Jewel liked on her pizza. What kind of shoes she wore. If Jewel kissed all her friends, if Jewel had time to see each other outside of work, when this was all over. If Jewel knew how a woman was supposed to make friends now when all of hers were still married or out of state or both.

She tried to think of a way to explain how funny it was that the birds and their coworkers were essentially the same. And that she had been thinking about pigeons nonstop since working here like, that Claudia felt for them and how this job had taught her so much. Humans had abandoned pigeons back to the wild and expected them to figure it all out on their own. Of course they walked with us, acted like us, ate our food. They wanted to be with us.

Claudia wasn’t sure if all that domesticated human DNA baked into pigeons still mattered like the field notebooks debated. She wondered if Jewel thought it was only a pantomime now, a shadow of someone else’s dreams teaching them to chase binned scraps after a taste of something old and comforting. She wondered if Jewel thought of them like children, if she worried after them and wanted them to do well on their own. Or maybe, they looked at us like big, strange birds, bumbling our ways through the scrap-filled nests of the world, fighting our way against the cold.

Instead, Jewel turned to her first. “So, do you have any idea what you’ll do next?”

Claudia’s gaze tracked a pigeon flying overhead. “What do you mean?”

“You only have about a month left with us. Have you been looking at other positions?”

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

She had not been. Claudia’s time at home had been whittled away to making meals and taking out the trash. Sometimes she and Ben watched a show together in the evenings but most of the time they didn’t. She’d ask him about his day and he’d reply in vague gestures and clipped replies, opting to spend most evenings with his friends. Claudia slept alone and woke up alone and rode the train alone and walked to the office alone, only flanked by pigeons and the hundred other people who waddle and chirp and shimmy into their assigned dovecot holes. She tried to find the right words to tell Jewel that she was not meant to fly solo, that she needed this place and the company it gave her, that she was starting to feel like a pigeon too.

“I’m looking for something back in education, maybe,” Claudia said. “I used to work in an elementary school’s office. One time, I had to chaperone a field trip to the zoo and a bird pooped on the third grade teacher.”

Jewel smiled, nodding along to Claudia’s story the same way she responded to floating heads on her screen. “I’ve heard that’s supposed to be good luck.”

*

            At home, Claudia ate dinner with Ben. She drove him to the park and stayed to watch his soccer practice. She sent a picture to Ben. Other Ben, she wanted to call him. Worse Ben. Irritating Ben. Ben Who Probably Didn’t Even Know His Son’s Jersey Number. Claudia’s traitorous mind had considered renaming her son, but that was hard to do when they’d reached a certain age and she thought Ben might have some grievances about it.

Out in the grass the boys ran back and forth, sometimes knocking into each other just for fun. There were pigeons running around too, just yards away chasing a hamburger wrapper across the parking lot flanked by some smaller sparrows. They lived outside of the city too, she’d been noticing more and more the birds stalking grocery store parking lots and sleeping on the post office roof and taking refuge under front yard shrubs. They looked the same out here as they did downtown, sleepy and a little aimless until they were startled by something into high alert.

Baby pigeons are born pink and featherless. They are fed by the crop milk of their parents, tucked safely away from any potential threats. But feral pigeon babies grow up fast, they need to be tough to exist in a world where danger comes for them constantly.

            Did pigeons ever feel jealousy? Did they ever throw other pigeons out of the nest when they got annoying? They hissed, they argued in fits of feathers and clashing beaks, but there was nothing in the field notes about how pigeons made up. When they soothed the other’s ruffled feathers, rubbed out the tension in their hackles, what about that? Did pigeons ever call each other in the middle of the night informing the other pigeon they’d rented an apartment across town? Did they name their pigeon children after themselves and then fly the coop? Claudia wondered what happened to the birds who got left behind. They probably had their pigeon friends, the other members of their colony to help with chores and cooking and helping their pigeon sons apply to high schools and traveling sports teams. Pigeons probably didn’t even notice someone left.

Everyone went out for drinks again at the end of the week to celebrate a successful deadline, a portfolio project or something else crucial to the ‘big picture’ that Claudia still only vaguely understood. They sat at the bar and Jewel leaned against Claudia’s shoulder, whispering jokes in her ear about how Lenard’s drunken pacing reminded her of an owl she saw once that had eaten part of an edible.

A dark haired, handsome man came in and walked over to their table to greet Jewel with a kiss. He introduced himself to Claudia like he already knew her, patted Lenard on the back and waved to the others. She didn’t catch his name, only watched his muscled arm where it draped over Jewel’s shoulder, the one that had just been resting against her shoulder. Jewel left shortly after with him, kissing both Claudia’s and Lenard’s cheeks goodbye.          

            Claudia stumbled up to the train platform an hour or so later, tipsy and off kilter. She was alone on the platform except for the clusters of pigeons. Some were cuddled under benches while others courted each other, strutting across worn wooden boards. Around and around they went, Claudia’s eyes traced over them as her vision spun at the edges.

The birds were all perfectly at ease here. For the feral pigeon, a city was a playground of hiding spots. An endless food buffet. A beautiful, stinky, concrete paradise that wild pigeons could never appreciate. Jewel had said that once. She thought the feral pigeons, the ones descended from abandoned, domesticated ancestors, had gained an advantage when it came to urban living. The ones with memories of lost comforts baked into their DNA now the best survivors.

            A pigeon’s optic nerve was about five centimeters long emerging out from the eye’s posterior hole. They had a nearly full 360 degree view of the world. They could see around themselves entirely. Pigeons bobbed their heads not just to communicate but to gain perspective, shaking their soft nerves to zoom in and out on the world like a camera. But the wulst of their brains that allowed for stereoscopic vision gave them little overlap compared to other birds. They had bad depth perception. Their rock dove ancestors didn’t need it. They only ever had to find a hole along a rocky cliff or mountain edge to call home. These pigeons moved premeditatively, choreography plotted out through generations of knowing this world was not built for them. The cone photoreceptors of their eyes held oil droplets that let pigeons see more color. Pigeons were drawn to bright colors. They liked to fill their nests with shiny plastic wrappers and scraps of fabric. Pigeons recycled. They took what others discarded in evolving claws and carried them into their homes, trusting old instincts to tell them how to shape it into something warm and safe. Their inner ears had electromagnetic cells that allowed them to trace direction, hone in on magnetic fields from the earth. The way home was built into pigeons’ bodies, even now, as they scavenged it from the slate gray holes of a new and strange wilderness. Claudia followed one pigeon as it flew up into the covered platform ceiling. It hopped daintily across a row of bird spikes zip tied to a beam, squawking when they pressed into its legs. It disappeared. Claudia climbed up on the bench, her dress shoe heels wobbling in the cracks, and looked up at the bird spikes, reaching out to prod their surface. They felt springy, softer than she’d imagined. Behind the spikes, more pigeons were crammed into the empty ceiling space nesting in pink insulation and dead leaves. Claudia gripped the beam to get a better look.

One of the birds puffed out their feathers at her, letting out a displeased rumble. Claudia tried to chirp back, twist her head side to side and bow. She cooed to it just like Jewel had cooed at her.

The bird flapped forward and Claudia fell back, crashing to the ground as her weight shifted, pulling the whole row of spikes she’d been holding down with her. She laid on the dirty ground with the wind knocked out of her. Startled pigeons flocked down from the ceiling. Their formless, spinning bodies hitting the ground sounded like applause. She closed her eyes and let the hard press of wood seep into her shoulders, soothed by the sounds of beating wings. The birds settled and when all was quiet again she looked to find them peering at her as if to help her back up.

            On Claudia’s last day Jewel brought her a cupcake and Lenard gave her a gift card for a bookstore she’d never heard of all the way across the city. They both hugged her and wished her luck with whatever came next. There was expectant twinge to the wish, a question buried in the lead. What was she going to do now? She imagined telling them the work here inspired her to go back to school and study ornithology. Or that she was returning to administrative work at another office, one with bigger windows and less confusing style guides. She nodded to her coworkers and accepted a final shoulder squeeze from Jewel. There was no exchanging of numbers, no offers to stay in touch.

Claudia left the office early, completed notebooks left stacked in her seat and the donor computer returned to Lenard’s desk. The sun was out and she headed for the park instead of the train. Pigeons still filled the fountain even though the spouting water had been turned off for the season, leaving only empty basins. Claudia perched herself on the fountain’s concrete edge and toed off her shoes, letting her socket feet touch the cold ground. Around her, pigeons flapped and pecked at old algae, their shining silver and purple crests gleaming in the sun.

Tomorrow, she would drive Ben to school instead of sending him on the bus. Ben would pick him up for their weekend together. She’d finally vacuum under the couch. Change her bedsheets. Do the laundry. Pull weeds in the garden. When Ben came to drop her son off back home, she’d invite him in for a cup of coffee and he’d decline as he always did, and her Ben would run out to the backyard with barely a word. Later they’d eat dinner together and she’d take him back to another soccer practice and Claudia would watch him, send a message to a friend who lived six hours away, and wait a week to hear a reply. Pigeons flocking beside her were unbothered by the cold breeze. The train’s all encompassing rumbling didn’t phase them one bit. Claudia’s own shoulders crept towards her ears with a shiver. When the wind washed over her again Claudia leaned into it, feeling it curl the ends of her hair and creep into her fingertips. She kicked her feet out in the air and flexed her toes like talons to crack them. Her arms opened wide as she could stretch and her mouth followed in a yawn, the air rushing through her as though she was nothing at all. Something inside unfurled. Pigeons huddled in the sun, heads glittering.

The second to last time Ellis saw Kat was as unexpected as the last.

The night was like any other in his young life. Having spent much of his middle school years the gangly odd one out, Ellis was late to the game and already beginning to feel hopeless having only just turned 18. Ellis had developed an unruly anxiety that manifested as a deep and abiding fear that he would leave for college without the secret code that would make him normal, the thing that made his older brother Neil a beloved member of their community whose homecomings filled their house with friends and girlfriends and parents and cousins all eager to see how the old sport was doing.

Ellis didn’t understand what Neil had that he didn’t. Why, when Ellis’s friends came over, did his parents never lavish them with attention? Why, in fact, did his friends rarely come over at all? Neil’s friends were like foster brothers, big men in North Face jackets whose booming voices carried up from the unfinished basement to rattle Ellis’s second floor bedroom and whose appetites could never be sated by the pancakes and nachos and pizzas his mother happily served up. After their visits the fridge would remain barren for weeks, Ellis left to fend for himself. If he ever complained, his mother would scold him for his lack of hospitality. 

This secret code, Ellis had come to believe, was what life was all about, and the fact that Ellis did not possess it was a sick joke played by the universe. Ellis stayed up late at night thinking of it; he thought about it during class, twisting it around in his mind like a math equation he couldn’t solve.

Why him, he could not tell. Ellis didn’t understand why his words always came out wrong. He didn’t know why he would find himself standing still at the edge of a gathering with nothing to add. He didn’t know why he sat alone each night paralyzed by some rootless anxiety coursing through his system.

All this Ellis could’ve weathered easily were it not for the virginal status his problems had caused. Once the hormonal olympics began, his stilted affect became conspicuous. When Ellis’s best friend Rick started ‘hanging out’ with Lauren, the cute girl in their AP Stat class, the one with the dimples, Ellis knew his days of peace were nearing an end.

Ellis tried to decipher what differentiated him from Rick. On any metric he could calculate, they were equals. They wore similar sneakers, they lived a few streets from each other, Rick’s house wasn’t much bigger or his parents more loving (in fact, if anything, they were worse, in Ellis’s estimation). They both drove hand-me-down cars with terrible mileage and stuffy seats. Even their hair were similar mops of dirty blonde curls.

Why, then, did Lance and Leon never bro around with Ellis the same way they did with Rick?  Why did Rick always have someone pushing to get his attention? When Ellis found himself spending his Sunday idly watching reruns of Ice Road Truckers, he didn’t know why he had not been invited to the lake trip Rick had posted on Instagram.

But it was the girls that stabbed his heart. As he watched his friends begin to return triumphantly from after-school hangs with tales of wet mouths and warm thighs, Ellis was left to nod along silently. They were being inducted into the world of the adult. They held secrets Ellis could barely imagine. He felt the gap between himself and his friends grow and grow until he felt like a childhood stuffed animal about to be thrown out in the spring cleaning.

Ellis made the pact one particularly dark evening as Rick posted Instagram stories from Lauren’s hot tub where Rick had brought the crew to drink, Ellis’s heart ripping open with each notification as he sat in the dark, waiting horribly long minutes for the next update. 

There and then Ellis decided, if it wasn’t going to happen naturally, he would force himself to change. He could torture himself forever about the ‘code’ he didn’t have but it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t have it. He decided to take his brother Neil as his model. Even if he didn’t understand it, he would now live as his brother did.

Ellis began to lift weights and joined the soccer team. He cut his hair, started drinking, and found ways to make the boys at school laugh. Ellis was a bit shocked how easy it had been. All he had to do was repeat their own jokes back, never disagree and nod along. Pretty soon he was at the parties, he was in Lauren’s hot tub.

Even after his success with Rick’s crew, Ellis still ended every evening of hard drinking crashing on the couch with Tommy Anderson while everyone else paired off and rushed to claim bedrooms. With the boys, he could simply mimic their behavior and it always seemed to work. But girls demanded more from Ellis. Their eyes asked for something he didn’t know how to offer.

It was a few scant weeks before graduation when Ellis, Tommy, Lance, Leon and Rick drove up to a party in the neighboring ‘burb, Liberty Village, which, while only 25 minutes away, felt worlds apart, for it had its own school district and strip mall.

Liberty, with its high-end boutiques, sit-down restaurants and fancy dine-in movie theater, was spoken of in equal parts loathing and desire by the residents of Commack Falls. Ellis never really understood this obsession as he had lived in Liberty before Ellis’s father, an electrician, had been pushed out of Liberty by the competition from a nationally franchised home improvement corporation and they’d been forced to relocate.

Ellis didn’t remember much about Liberty. This would be the first time he had been back since he was a kid. All he could really remember was green, exuberant green; massive lawns, parks that never ended.

They arrived fashionably late, the party was packed and they didn’t know a soul. Ellis noticed the clothes first; boutique athleisure and Travis Scott tees and even an Off White shirt he’d only seen on Instagram before.

Ellis and Rick pushed their way to the kitchen. The kitchen was stacked with high-end bottles of liquor and racks of beer. Ellis drank a Hamm’s, a High Life and a Bud in quick succession. As the alcohol warmed the edges of Ellis’s mind, he fell into a conversation with a girl whose name sounded like Jane or Jean; he hadn’t really been listening. Ellis nodded along as Jane or Jean talked about school, her friends. When Jean or Jane said goodbye without a second glance, Ellis felt more relieved than disappointed.

The night wore on and the boys drank more and more. Tommy dragged Ellis into a conversation with two block-chested bros with long curling blonde hair pulled tight under identical ball caps. Ellis began to imagine who he would have been if his family had stayed here in Liberty. Perhaps he would be one of these bros. Perhaps he would still have come to this party, wearing a designer tee and wandering home down well-paved streets to a house full of frozen pizzas and gourmet snacks.

As his mind wandered, Ellis noticed a girl staring at him from across the room. The eye contact sent a jolt of panic into his heart. He tried to focus intently on the two boys in front of him, feeling inexplicably guilty. He peeked back at her. She was still staring. He quickly averted his gaze.

Ellis turned back to Tommy’s conversation but couldn’t find a place to jump back in. He snuck a look back at the girl. She sat between two energetic friends, all three dressed in a gothic hippie style Ellis had never seen in Commack.

Was she checking him out? Was that what that looked like? Was that what that felt like? What was he supposed to do? Ellis decided that the only thing that would truly curse him now would be to ignore her and set himself up for a lifetime of cowardice.

So Ellis stepped towards her. As he got closer, the girl waved to him meekly. This confused Ellis. They faced each other across the room for a moment before Ellis remembered his mission and set out toward her once again. But before he could think of anything to say, the girl leapt forward and embraced him. She pulled away and asked him if he’d moved back to Liberty and exclaimed how excited she was to see him. 

This was not what Ellis expected. He stammered that no, he lived in Commack Falls and was only here for the party. He tentatively asked her name. An imperceptible shudder came over her face as if all her energy had dropped into her chest.

“It’s Kat.”

The name took a moment to sink into Ellis’s alcohol-slogged brain, falling smoothly past layers of thoughts and memories, landing, with a thud, in the pit of his stomach. Little Kat Werner. He’d almost forgotten her. Or in fact he had forgotten her, forced her out of his mind, along with all that didn’t fit with who he had become.

“Kat. Oh my god. Hi.”

“You didn’t remember me.”

“I just didn’t expect to see you.”

“Me neither.” Ellis felt sweat pouring down his face. He waited for her to say something else but she simply stared at him with those piercing eyes.

“How are you?” He finally managed to squeak out. Kat smirked slightly.

“I still live here so how well can I be?” If Ellis was older, he may have thought he was having a heart attack.

“I kinda thought you’d left Commack and moved somewhere far away… I don’t know why I thought that.” Ellis knew why she thought that, that he had never been back, never called, never opened that door ever again.

“No, I was still here. I just got… busy.” Ellis wanted to kick himself.

“Sure, we all got pretty busy in middle school. Big tests.”

“I really didn’t expect to see you.”

“Clearly.”

“Are you off to college? I’m going to Indiana. Accounting.”

“I’m supposed to. Not sure if I’m going to go or not. I think the whole thing is a bit of a scam really. I mean, what kind of education could we possibly be paying for that we couldn’t find on our own?”

Ellis remembered the drive to her house. It had been short, just down his street, over a little bridge, up that steep hill. He could remember the feeling of his head pressed against the cool glass of the car window waiting to arrive, the world spinning in front of him. The uncomfortable silence was punctured by Kat’s squeal as she grabbed Ellis by the shoulder.

“Oh my god. Did you ever finish Raccoonauts?” Ellis would sit behind Kat watching her play that game for hours. They’d hole up in her room and only come out when Ellis’s mother would call. Ellis remembered being told he could sleep over at Ryan’s house but not Kat’s, a boundary he never understood. He loved that room and especially loved Raccoonauts. He had felt something very close to happiness then, watching her curly head shaking with the ferocity of her button pushing. He had peed his pants once, desperate to hold onto that feeling as long as he could.

“Oh my god. I forgot about that. We were obsessed.” Ellis felt like he would be sick.

“You play the second one?”

“I don’t really play many games anymore.”

“That one was… fun.”

Ellis felt a strange clarity as he studied Kat’s face. He knew this was the moment he’d been expecting all night, all year, maybe all his life, and that whatever he did now would determine the path of his future. He felt sure of this in a way he couldn’t explain. And really, if he thought about it, his choice was already made for him, he was only following a trail that had been built long ago.

A howl built in Ellis’s chest. He wanted to grab hold of her shoulders and plead that he never meant to leave, that he never meant to lose her, that they could go back and play Raccoonauts again if only they could escape this party, these boys, this code. If he could just say something, anything, a new life would open up before him, a life full of warm breath and love and feeling, far from the icy Commack winter that had settled on his heart.

But Tommy was calling from the living room and the words evaporated the moment they touched the hot air of the party. Ellis was aware, even as he mumbled that he’d be right back, that he would never see her again, and that the door to that life was shut for good. Ellis walked back to Tommy, Rick and the girl with the pukka shell necklace Tommy was chatting up, who might have a friend Ellis can talk to about school or soccer or tv and who might, if he tries hard enough, let him kiss her.

Ellis didn’t look back, knowing that if he did, he would not survive it. 

The last time Ellis saw Kat would be the last time anyone saw her.

Ellis had kept track of her life somewhat. It was hard not to, in the way that any successful once-upon-a-time citizen of a small town is a never-ending source of pride and envy. Ellis would never admit it but he followed her a bit more than most. He read her profiles, he watched her interviews, he enjoyed her work. To his wife Annie, Ellis’s interest in Kat was an easily understood affection for an old classmate. Ellis still looked for her name in the paper every Sunday and often looked wistfully out towards the cul-de-sac where she had once lived.

For Ellis had settled in Liberty after all. He’d spent his college years in Indiana, then a few years in Chicago. But the city was more trouble than it was worth and when Annie took his hand one day and nodded yes she did want kids and sooner rather than later, it was to Liberty that he took her.

Ellis had felt like a hero. He was not returning to Commack, where the houses rarely extended past the first floor, no, he would raise his children in Liberty where his neighbors mowed their lawns and he could send his children to play without fear. Indeed, Ellis had succeeded, in spite of what he had begun to feel was his inherent propensity for mediocrity. So Ellis and Annie settled into a modest four bedroom and got to procreating.

The years were blissful for a while. Their daughters were beautiful and carefree, his career advanced in slow but steady increments. Ellis settled into it happily,18 years lost in a blur of early morning coffee, commutes, work, dinners, weekends full of group activities and playdates.

A year after his youngest left for college, Ellis found himself promoted to project management supervisor, which allowed him to buy the new car Annie had been hinting at, but which brought an emptiness to his days he’d never felt before. Ellis spent hours staring at emails and spreadsheets, unsure what anyone needed from him. He made busy work for himself, micromanaging his subordinates and making up excuses. Mostly he just stared out at the industrial car park, listening to the hum of the highway until it was a decent hour to run out the door as if he was late to a meeting.

Ellis had trouble sleeping for the first time in his life. He would lie next to Annie for hours before slipping downstairs to watch the early gray light of dawn rise above the tennis court. In those long mornings, he found himself lost in foggy memories. It was as if he was catching a glimpse of a lost ghost town, the Liberty of his childhood. In those moments, he remembered how every lawn, street and fence had contained the universe, how they had rambled through the world, him and Kat, filled with magic.

One Saturday, Ellis woke to an email from Kat.Werner@Gmail.com. He excused himself from the living room mumbling about urgent work and headed to his rarely-used study where he read the email again quickly, then once more, slowly. Kat was sorry if her email was a disturbance but she’d found his address on a list sent around by the organizing committee of the Liberty school reunion and couldn’t help herself. She wrote tentatively; How was he? Where did he live now?

Kat confessed she didn’t know why she was emailing him, that maybe he didn’t remember her, but seeing his name had awoken memories of their time together and she felt compelled to write. She hoped Ellis was well.

That afternoon, Ellis sat down to compose a response. He had no idea how to start. He spent two hours at the computer procrastinating by playing his daughters in internet chess. Then he turned back to his open tab. Ellis told Kat it was wonderful to hear from her and he of course remembered her. How could he forget?

He stopped, unsure of how to broach the elephant in the email. Ellis feared that Kat would still see him as who he had been that night, fueled by hormones and insecurity, that he had erased whatever Ellis she had known before.

That night. he wrote back. He told her he was sorry too. He tried to explain he had been quite drunk the last time they spoke. But not just that, he tried to explain everything he had been going through then. His explanation became another thousand explanations. Once Ellis started he couldn’t stop. He explained how he was homesick every day of college, that he almost bombed out his sophomore year, and he only got his job in Chicago through the father of a friend. Maybe that same insecurity had led him to marry Annie only a year after meeting her, reasoning that for the first time here was a girl who wasn’t waiting for a chance to slip out the door. And maybe, he supposed, that same need had led him back to Liberty.

Soon enough, Ellis had written for four hours and had a 15 page email draft saved. He couldn’t send this to her. He took out most of the part about Annie and his kids, cut his ‘apology’ to a few sentences, and sent it.

Kat’s reply came less than two hours later. She was glad to hear from him, that she had been worried her email would have scared him off. She feared he had forgotten everything. What had happened after that, she wanted to know. She wanted to know about everything, every detail of his life, every boring anecdote he’d told thousands of times. She wanted to know about his wife, about his children, about Liberty; did the sign still have mold growing over the L or did they finally fix it?

The few details she provided about her life confounded Ellis. She was living just a few hours north of Liberty in Grand Mire, a resort town on Lake Superior where she was living in the basement of an old friend’s house. She was writing her emails on her friend’s laptop in the one cafe with public wifi.

Kat spent most of the email remembering Ellis. She had come to believe their time together was the most profound of her life. She believed they had been two halves of a whole, the only two souls that existed in the world. Her elaborate, looping writing style spun Ellis’s head right round. She must not have edited it at all, he surmised.

In his response, Ellis told her of course he remembered it all.

-Do you remember the games we’d play in your backyard? And that film we wrote?

We made your father play the part of the monster in the woods.

Kat wrote back immediately. Ellis was still in the study and was shocked to hear the ding of his inbox.

-He hated that. Complained the whole time. But he did do it, didn’t he.

So began a month of a free-flowing jagged exchange, a fervent 24 hour conversation. Their email chain grew, dozens of bite sized bits of memory. At first Ellis didn’t hide anything from Annie since there was nothing to hide. But when, one night, he found himself making an excuse just so he could check his inbox once more before bed, he realized he had been hiding all along.

What Ellis felt with Kat was something he couldn’t find anywhere else. Ellis took great pride in being a good father to his daughters, but he had always felt like he was playing a role. He was glad he knew his lines and felt the applause every time he saw the grown-ups his children had become. But his memories with Kat lit kindling in a hole in his heart he had forgotten had once been a bonfire.

So he kept emailing.

When Kat casually suggested Autumn was the perfect time to visit Grand Mire, it felt natural for Ellis to suggest he come up and see her sometime. She didn’t respond for a day. Ellis spent the morning staring out his office window. At noon, he walked to the bathroom and puked up his breakfast. He skipped the staff lunch and went straight home, where he discovered Kat’s email waiting for him.

Kat would love for him to visit but she knew he was very busy and may not have the time. It was short and Ellis could feel the fear in every word. Her fear filled him with relief.

He emailed back that he usually drove past Grand Mire when heading to Milwaukee for conferences (true) and he actually had one coming up shortly that he could extend for a night to swing by (false).

He told Annie that night about the conference sprung on him. They negotiated the specifics over lukewarm rotisserie chicken from Kroger’s. Ellis wrote back that night. He finally ended an email with “see you soon”.

They met at the Bear Tracks Resort & Lodge, near-deserted at 2pm on a Friday. Ellis was shown to her table by the squirrel-cheeked waitress who seemed moderately excited to have two paying customers at once. They embraced awkwardly. Kat patted his arm strangely. Neither spoke. Ellis was vibrating.

“Find this place okay? I know it’s a bit out of the way but it’s the only place to get some real grub around here.” Kat picked up her plastic menu and perused it over-enthusiastically. “They’ve got great breakfast food here. Oh and the coffee! Brilliant!”

Ellis took stock of Kat. While he had seen pictures of her online, most of the photos were from decades ago. Her appearance was different, sure; her gaunt face, her hair cut clumsily short, her hands stained with tar, but it was her energy that most surprised him. She was fidgeting constantly, leg bouncing, eyes fluttering to and fro. She burst in and out of conversation as if pouncing on prey.

As they ordered, Ellis became more and more perturbed. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe the Kat he had imagined, and the Ellis he was sure she had constructed, would never appear.

“How’s your wife? Annie, right? I read it in the database- And you have kids right? Do they live at home?” Ellis had assumed she would have avoided the topic of Annie on pain of death. She looked away, scratching at the back of her ear.

“Annie’s okay. I have two daughters. Both in college. We’re adjusting.”

“Wow. Two kids in college. Incredible. We’re really grown up, huh.”

If Ellis didn’t know better, he’d have said drugs. But she was too conscious for that. Maybe drugs in the past, he wagered. Maybe she was simply another lost soul like Tommy who’d took a turn and started calling Ellis on every drunken night to complain how his life hadn’t turned out how he wanted. Maybe he should get back up, go home, and tell Annie the conference had ended early due to some poorly-refrigerated shellfish.

But then Kat leapt forward, grasped his hand tightly and looked at him with those big sad eyes. 

“Ellis. You’re wandering.” He smiled reflexively, heartlessly.

“I’m still… y’know. Reeling.”

“Me too.”

“I’ve thought a lot about seeing you again. Obviously.”

“Me too.”

“And now here you are. And I realize I had forgotten you’re a real person.” Her eyes grew red as she smiled, holding back tears. “I’m working through it. Maybe I’ll write you an email about it.”

They walked along the beach afterwards, holding their jackets tight against the wind. Kat didn’t have a hat or scarf, her curls bouncing dangerously.

“I never stopped.”

“What?”

“Thinking about you. Obviously I wasn’t thinking about you, more like my memories of you… Sorry, I’m rambling. This is a lot harder in person.”

“I get it.” Ellis didn’t really get it.

“Sometimes I would stop. And I would think… Is this really me? Is this the same girl who ran away into the park behind our houses and lived off berries and Lunchables? Who used to capture little insects with my bare hands? Did she become this?”

“Who did she become?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” They kept walking in silence. “I’m just scared that I may have ruined it already.” Kat shuddered. “I’m sorry. I knew I’d react to seeing you but not this much. Not ever this much.”

Ellis reached out to console her but she recoiled from his touch. For a moment, Kat eyed him, all signs of girlishness gone in an instant. Then a smile rippled onto Kat’s face and she pulled away. “This is so embarrassing, but I have this fantasy that always comes back whenever I’m sad or something bad happens or I just don’t know what. I used to say it was a joke but it was always real to me. Whenever people would ask, y’know, do you have a plan? Are you going to get married? Have kids? Have a family?

‘I’d say ‘well, yeah. I know who I’m marrying. All three of ‘em. There’s my first husband that I’ll marry young and passionately, who I’ll love with my whole body and soul… but that kind of thing never lasts, you can’t build a life on that. So we’ll divorce in some heart-breaking way. But once I’ve recovered, I’ll marry my second husband, an old friend who moved away. We’ve both had our first loves and first heartbreaks. We rekindle our feelings slowly, taking our time. We settle down, we have kids, we make a life… But those things end too. The kids leave, things stagnate, you still love them but you don’t love love them. You don’t think about them in the shower or when you’re wasting time on a lazy afternoon. They’re just facts then, not people, just facts of your life. So it ends but it ends amicably. Then I’m old and alone, and making do. Working on myself, my goals, my career. And that’s when I meet you again.”

Kat turned to Ellis. He felt as if he was seeing her for the first time.

“And we have both lived for so long and we are so tired of life but still living. We’ve gotten into trouble and gotten ourselves out of it and that comes with baggage but we’ve gotten rid of the baggage. We just don’t care anymore. We’re free! And so we meet, and we know that… We’ve always loved each other. From the very first moment I met you, you were mine and I was yours and all this other time was just the in-between. And now here we are, old and together and happy. And we’d get to do whatever the fuck we want.”

Ellis can’t help himself but lean in when she does. The kiss is unlike any he’s felt in years. Ellis wondered if she’ll ever pull away. But she does. And big droopy tears flooded down her face. And she seemed to have barely noticed Ellis’s lips at all.

“And I worry I’ve ruined it, Ellis. That maybe that was once my future and now it isn’t. That along the way it was taken from me. And now we’ll never find each other.”

“We are right here, Kat.” He pulls her in. He needs it. Whatever she can give.

He barely sees her place until it’s all over and the sun has set. Before that it was all just limbs and breath. He knew this was what he came for but it still shocked him when it happened. It had been unlike any of the sex he’d had with Annie. Even in their passionate early days, Annie had always been more interested in the moments surrounding sex than the sex itself. But Kat didn’t want anything from him except his body. Maybe it was different, sex in your middle age, sex without marriage, sex that didn’t have to match up to all the sex that had come for decades before.

He sat on the side of the bed and watched her breath. His heart beat out of his chest. The sunset was a gorgeous blaze of purple and orange on the lake.

Ellis did not want to be here when the sun came back up. After two decades, he’d thrown it all away in an afternoon. He needed fresh air. It was too hot in here, there was no circulation and the heater was blasting.

Kat woke up to smoke, huddling outside in a matronly nightgown. She came back in and wrapped her arms around his chest. He thought about when he will get home tomorrow and tell Annie he’d decided to skip the second day of the conference. He will sit on the couch with her and watch trashy tv before dozing off.

In the morning, they got breakfast at the little cafe in town. They ordered bear claws and coffee and watched the elderly patrons sip oversized lattes. Ellis reminded her he had a conference to get to. She simply nodded.

“Do you have any plans today?” Ellis asked to break the silence.

“I… cleared my schedule. I guess I’ll probably go out on Peter’s boat.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“He’s the only real friend I’ve made here. We go fishing most days. That’s what I do now. I’m a fisherwoman. More of a fisherwoman’s wife to be honest.”

“His wife?”

“Not like that. Just that I haul in the fish, do the busy work, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds relaxing.”

“Very Zen.”

They lingered for a few more minutes before Ellis couldn’t take it anymore and said he should really be going. At the last minute, Kat took his hand and, barely above a whisper, pleaded with him to stay. For a moment, he wavered.

“We’ll see each other soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

He didn’t hear for a few days. It was only in the second wave of the investigation that they found his emails. Ellis and Annie were eating dinner in front of the TV when they called. He assumed the local number was just some robo-caller trying to sell him spamware. Only after the show ended did he see the voicemail.

They’d searched for her body for a week but were calling the investigation off. They’d keep her case open the standard ten years but, the detective muttered into the phone, he shouldn’t hold his breath. The detective confessed that was a poor choice of words.

Peter was adamant she was alive. He said this was the kind of game she always played with him. He told the police that she had brought a strange bag onto the boat with her that morning, which had disappeared, even though she’d left her clothes and backpack on deck.

The police, her ex-husband, the media, and everyone else who knew her thought otherwise. Even Peter admitted the hard facts left little room for hope; he had only been below deck for a few minutes, not long enough for her to have swam very far, and he had looked for her for a half hour, trying to spot a head bobbing in the water.

While Peter protested quietly that she had been happy, it was easy for everyone else to build a case against her. Here was a tragic woman who chose a brutal way out. She was eulogized with the standard amount of passion. She was given the obituaries, the feuding critical re-evaluations, the mourning tweets, and then the slow fade into a Wikipedia article.

Ellis drove straight up to Grand Mire the night he heard the news. He told Annie his oldest friend in the world was gone. He booked a room at Bear Tracks. Every morning, he would eat at the same table they had sat at before heading out to the search and rescue boats.

Ellis told the police everything. He knew he’d just be the cheating bastard to them but he didn’t care. Maybe she had left a secret message for him and if he just cracked it, she’d reappear and they’d embrace again. He hoped to at least find some note addressed to him that told him why it had to end like this. She could explain he had just been part of some sick final game, a last hurrah in the world, a last fuck you to him and to everyone else she was leaving behind. 

He stayed long after the official searches were over and the boats cleared out of the harbor. He told Annie he couldn’t come home. He would wake up before sunrise and head out to the beach before anyone was awake. He’d listen to the waves and the wind and close his eyes and imagine they were Kat whispering just to him. 

Only Peter noticed. He, too, couldn’t sleep, and spent his mornings on his boat, watching the lake for signs of life. After a few weeks, Peter invited Ellis out on his boat with him. Peter took the same route he had taken that day everyday now. Together, they looked into the inky black water and waited for her to appear.

He was a boy and he lived in a house of men, or the house of boys, as his grandmother called it. He was transported between the two houses, his dad’s father’s house and his mom’s mother’s house because he wasn’t old enough to ride his bike to and from yet.

His grandpa “Pop” was Tom, and he taught college students economics, which wasn’t on his own school schedule, but math was on there, and Pop said it was like math, plus how people worked. His dad was Thomas, and he was an engineer, which had to do with math plus machines. The house of the house of men was large and had a decent-sized backyard.

Grandma and mom’s house was smaller and smelled like banana bread usually, unless she cooked something else and then it smelled like that for a bit before going back to banana bread. It was good banana bread, but you had to specifically request chocolate chips, otherwise you were going to get just plain banana bread.

The house of men was always cleanest on Tuesdays because that was when Lola came. She mopped and she vacuumed, and she adjusted the china so that it was just right. That was the only time the china was touched, so Tommy wasn’t sure why it needed to be adjusted. In the house of men, they often ate takeout on paper plates with plastic forks that all went into the garbage right after, which was nice because then there was no disruption to their TV watching.

They were outside on a warm fall night and Tommy knew he wouldn’t be sent to bed on time because there was no clock outside, and both their phones were inside, charging. Dad had his laptop with football on, and Pop was looking wistfully out into the distance, glancing at the game whenever he took a swig of beer. They were finishing dinner of take-out barbecue when Dad asked Pop about Thanksgiving. Pop was non-committal because he was sad. No Angie.

“But we’ll be here, and I was wondering what we should have for dinner.”

“I’m supposed to ask everyone what they’re thankful for – Mrs. Stanton said so,” interjected Tommy.

“I’m thankful for you buddy! And that you’ll be with us on Thanksgiving” said Dad in his Dad voice, ruffling Tommy’s hair. “What are you thankful for Tommy?”

Dad had a “Dad” voice for Tommy and sometimes Pop, and a regular voice for most other people and the TV when football was on. Both were good voices. Pop just had one voice, and Tommy liked that too.

“Ummm my parents and my grandparents and food and education and-“

“Is that what your teacher told you say,” said Pop wryly. “I’LL tell you what you should be thankful for kid – private property rights!”

“Private – what?”

“Private. Property. Rights. They’re the most important thing we have. Without them we couldn’t have an economy, we couldn’t build anything, we wouldn’t own anything! Anyone could just come to our house and say that it was theirs!”

“Ok, I’m thankful for private property rights. Because I like our yard and I like making fires,” said Tommy.

“And private property rights aren’t just about land – your stuff, your ideas are your property too,” said Pop, leaning in and putting down his beer so he could talk with both hands.

“Mrs. Stanton says we’re supposed to share our stuff with people.” said Tommy.

“WELL,” said Pop, “how would she like it if I just borrowed her car sometime? Yeah, I don’t think so. Also, if everyone just gave everything away all the time, it wouldn’t be worth anything. And then no one would ever bother making stuff again because they have no INCENTIVE, no INCENTIVE to work or invest their resources.”

Tommy just listened. He liked when Pop waved his arms around and talked loud like this.

“You tell the kids in school to be thankful for private property rights.” Said Pop, “No one can just take their stuff or just come into their house.”

Tommy nodded.

“I think it’s time for bed Professor,” said Dad in his Dad voice.

The house of men was done for the night. And they all went to bed with dreams of private property rights dancing in their heads.

The next morning Tommy went to school with his usual things packed since he was going to the house of women afterwards. And so he did, and grandma was there to greet him as soon as he stepped off the bus.

“It’s my Tommy!” She said, taking his backpack off his shoulders and carrying it over her arm after she hugged him.

“How was school?”

“Good”

“What did you eat for lunch?”

“A sandwich”

“What kind of sandwich”

“Ham”

“Just ham? Did you eat enough? Are you hungry? Are you tired, do you want to nap?”

“No”

“No not hungry? What about a nap?”

“No”

“No? Ok, let me know if you want a snack later.”

“Okay”

The questions stopped briefly as they walked inside and Tommy took off his shoes, because that what was you did in the house of women.

The house of women had many things in it that could break, so running space was limited. There were plates not used for eating, dolls not used for playing, and vases not used for flowers.

But there were also things you could touch, like a kaleidoscope and snow globes. There was always food offered to you and usually more cooking in the oven for later. Mom lived there with Grandma, who was usually home. Mom wasn’t there a lot because her job was to fly on planes but was almost always there when he was there. There were also lots of questions in the house of women – about how school was, and how Dad and Pop are, and how things are at their house, and if he washed his hands, and what the teacher said, and how he felt about all of these things, and if he felt sad about it or mad about it, and what he was looking forward to that week. Often, he did not know the answers or thought he got the answer wrong. Since there were so many questions in the house of women he preferred to go on weekends and not right after school, since that was all questions too.

He was doing his homework when Grandma asked if he’d like a snack, and if he’d like chips, and if he’d like potato or tortilla, and if he’d like something to drink with that and if he’d like milk or water and how his homework was going. He was brought potato chips and water and continued with his subtraction problems.

Once Mom came home, they would all sit together at the table for dinner. There was never TV during dinner at the house of women. Tommy sometimes missed TV, but Mom and Grandma sat across from each other so watching them was a bit like watching a show. That night was about Stephanie Winder who had grown up in the neighborhood and moved away and was now back with a family in tow, because Seattle was probably too expensive and her parents will need help in a few years, or at least her dad will, and the mother isn’t all there you know. After covering the news of the day, they would turn towards him and begin the interview.

“Did you finish your homework?” Asked Mom.

“Yep”

“Any tests or projects coming up?”

“I have to make a diorama.”

“A diorama? Of what?”

“Something from Alice in Wonderland.”

“Oh ok. We’ll figure out what stuff to get for it. Unless you’re already working on it at Dad’s?”

“Nope”

“Ok so he hasn’t bought anything for it?”

“No”

“Okay, well make a list of supplies.” Said Mom, very business-like.

Back at the house of men, Tommy was outside gathering sticks for a fire and came in to ask Pop when they could start it.

“Hi Tommy,” said Pop without getting up.

“Hi Pop!”

“Hey, I thought of something today – I don’t know what made me think of it – maybe it was that Whittaker Chambers documentary – anyway, here’s what you do if you get in trouble at school and they make you call your parents – this is what I did, and it worked like a charm. So what happens is, I have to go into the principal’s office to make a phone call to my mother because I got in trouble –“

“What did you do?”

“Oh, I don’t actually remember. Something. Probably pulled a girl’s hair. But anyway, I was-”

“Mrs. Stanton says you can’t do that – you need consent before touching people.”

“Yeah well, we didn’t have consent when I was growing up – and if a girl consents to you pulling her hair, watch out for her – don’t get serious with her, she’s crazy. Anyway, I was in school, and I got in trouble, and they told me I had to call my mom and tell her what I did. Me and another guy – Joey – Joey…Trupiano, short guy. So, Joey goes before me, and his mother picks up the phone and really gives it to him. Then it was my turn, so I dial our house, but no one answers. Well, I thought of this in the moment – the teacher was watching me and listening to me, but she couldn’t hear what was going on on the other side of the call. So, I pretended like my mother had picked up the phone and I was talking to her. I said what I did and that I was in trouble, and then I just made sure to pause long enough and say “yes mom” and “sorry” and it was a very convincing performance! I got away with it!”

Tommy was impressed. “But,” he said, “now we have voicemail, and if I called Mom and she didn’t answer it would go to voicemail, and then she would listen to the voicemail, so it probably wouldn’t work.”

“Damn, you kids have it tough. Even your dad could have gotten away with it on our landline if he got back fast enough to erase the message. I guess it would be hard to get ahold of your mom’s cell before she would see the voicemail,” said Tom with inquisitiveness.

They both continued assessing the problem and possible solutions in silence for some time.

Later that week Tommy was at the house of women waiting for Dad to pick him up for soccer practice. He glanced the clock in the kitchen to make sure he was ready, but not so often or so obviously that Grandma or Mom would notice and think he couldn’t wait to leave. This was especially important to avoid before being taken away for the entire weekend. It was crucial to get it just right – to be ready to go and to go without any perceived hesitation or worry, but to also not speed too fast towards the door. Mom could not be given a reason to say Tommy didn’t want to go with Dad, but also couldn’t have hurt feelings over him wanting to leave. It was best to simply happen to be near the door when Dad rang the doorbell.

But the doorbell didn’t ring. And this was a PROBLEM because now Tommy would be LATE for soccer practice. Tommy tried to explain to Mom that he wouldn’t be late yet, not yet, but she had other ideas.

“Let’s call him,” Mom said, whipping out her phone and handing it to Tommy, who was familiar with this routine.

“What.” Said Thomas in his regular voice.

“Hi Dad, it’s Tommy.”

“Oh hey Buddy, sorry, I’ll be there in 2 minutes,” said Dad in an extra Dad voice.

“Ok” said Tommy

“It’s NOT OK,” said Mom sharply, “tell him he’s making you late to soccer practice!”

No way out.

Then Dad said, “I’m gonna go buddy, because I’m driving –  I’ll see you in a few minutes.” Three beeps ending the call. Tommy almost took the phone away from his ear but then paused. It would work, he thought, as long as Mom didn’t get too close to the phone and see.

“You’re making me late to soccer practice.” He paused, 4 Mississippis. “ok” pause 1 Mississippis, “Ok bye.” He handed the phone back to Mom who looked pleased. He almost smiled but kept it inside of himself. He was smart and wanted to tell Pop all about it.

His only fear was that Mom would notice what time her phone said the call ended and realize. They noticed everything in the house of women. Scrapes, scratches, undone buttons and shoelaces, frowns, and even spilled water, which is almost invisible.

There was no Grandma in the house of men, just like there was no Pop in the house of women. Both had died before he was born. Pop talked about when she won big at poker in Vegas, and when they visited Japan together and spoke about her softly to Dad late at night sometimes and usually on Christmas. There had been another woman in his life – or still in his life – Angie. Pop and Angie had been married before Tommy was born, but also split up, like Mom and Dad. Tommy only remembered one Thanksgiving with her there. There were lots of people and lots of food. This was before it had become the house of men, because she was usually there. She still stopped in and saw Pop, but not as much as he wanted. Dad said to just call her Angie.

“Angie, come on, please – I really want you to come…but why can’t you?…No, I won’t do that again, I promise…well, just think about it, please?”

There was a pause and then Pop defeatedly said “Okay, goodbye then.”

Pop put his hand over his face and then ran it through his hair, wiping off some of his look before speaking to Tommy.

“I don’t understand women!” He exclaimed, stuffing the phone back in his pocket.

Tommy thought this made sense. Pop and Grandma were different species. Same Kingdom, phylum, class, and genus, but different families and surely species.

Later that night Tommy woke up slowly to a song outside.

Ooo baby, I love your way, everyday,

He lay in bed, listening to a voice he knew but was different. Curiosity drew him out of sleepiness, and he went to the window. In the dark, Pop was singing out in the yard, pacing around in unpredictable patterns, holding his phone up to his mouth.

Shadows grow long before my eyes,

And they’re moving across the page,

Suddenly day turns into niiiiight,

Far away, from the city

But don’t, hesitate

Because your love just something somethiiiiing..

Ooh Angie, I love your way, everyday

Wanna tell you I love your way, everyday,

This went on until Dad came running out in his underwear and ushered Pop inside. He hadn’t really sounded bad, Tommy thought. That was probably a voicemail Pop actually wanted heard.

A few nights later at the house of women, Mom had just flown in and was having a late dinner. Tommy was playing on the iPad in the next room, intent upon reaching the next level of Flying Pickle Circus, but also listening to the dialogue because it was about Mom’s work, which was usually exciting.

Tonight’s dialogue was focused on people.

“He’s the worst pilot – not at flying I mean, just terrible with people. ‘Sorry you feel that way,’ he says to me and Mona, so rude.”

“But you’re supposed to look inside the first aid kit before a flight!

“Exactly, and he doesn’t listen when we tell him the protocol has changed. Says he has to “check on that”. So I told him that it’s not just seeing if the first aid kit is there, we have to go through everything in it and check off the list – and I would know because I’ve been doing this for eight years. And then he says, “You’re not going to be doing it a day longer if you don’t announce take-off in the next five minutes.”

“Terrible,” said Grandma, shaking her head.

“And later when he confirms that I AM right, he can’t even admit it, he says, “’sorry I was direct with you, I was just trying to get us moving.’” Said Mom, slowing down and speaking each word individually when she got to the pilot’s line.

“Men and their fake apologies. ‘Sorry you feel that way.’ How about, sorry I’m constantly a jerk.” said Mom, snorting and getting up. 

Tommy wondered what the pilot was doing right now and he if knew he was the center of tonight’s dinner theatre. He often thought about being a pilot, with Mom up in the sky, making the announcements about when they would land. Perhaps he wouldn’t be a pilot now.

Mom came over and switched into her Mom voice.

“Hi honey, how was school?”

“Good”

“Good, any tests?”

“Just vocab.”

“Okay, what about the diorama? What do you need for that?

“A shoe box”

“Wait – I thought Dad already gave you one?”

“It was the wrong size.”

Mom made a sound that clearly conveyed annoyance.

“He can’t even give you the right box!”

“I didn’t know how big it was supposed to be,” Tommy said quickly.

“Did the teacher tell you?”

“Yeah, but I forgot.”

“Okay well…so the teacher told you to get another box?”

“Yeah.”

“In front of everyone?”

“ummm…yes?” Said Tommy, trying to think of how to describe the scene.

“How did that make you feel? Was it a hard day?”

He thought hard about whether it was a hard day, not wanting to get the answer wrong. Sometimes saying something was bad was bad, but sometimes it was good, and it was hard to know the difference.

“I don’t know…I guess I felt like umm…I brought the wrong thing.”

“Well, that’s not a feeling, but ok. I’ll make sure you have the right box.”

The problem was fixed, and the questions were over, and Tommy smiled at Mom.

Back at the house of men, Tommy was overhearing more phone calls.

“Angie, listen – ok stop for a minute – just listen, I’m sorry, ok? You know I wouldn’t drink like that at a holiday with people over, I mean come on! Do you really think – no, come on Angie don’t hang up, you don’t have to get so worked up over this, it was just a voicemail – hello? Hello? Angie! Hello?”

Pop cursed and Tommy heard a thud which was probably him slamming his iPhone down on the countertop.

It was quiet for a minute, and then Pop arrived with a soft stomp in the living room where Tommy was sitting at the table, pretending to do his homework.

“Women are just – I don’t know! Everything has to be such a big deal with them. You know what’s a big deal? Our country being a trillion dollars in debt, or China stealing our intellectual property or –“

“Don’t say a fake apology,” said Tommy.

“A what?”

“A fake apology. It’s when you…when you say sorry that they feel a way instead of saying sorry for what you did.”

“So you give advice on women now?”

Tommy shrugged.

“Well, I guess you’re around them more than I am these days,” said Pop, looking down at his hands.

After a pause Pop looked back up at Tommy. “You’re a chameleon, you know that?”

“A what?” Said Tommy, wondering if Pop was on the sauce again, as Grandma would say.

“A chameleon. You change with your surrounds. Chameleons – they’re kinda like lizards – they can make themselves look like their surroundings so predators can’t find them. They can go from green to purple to orange. Survival.”

Yes, he thought, he had been playing a chameleon all along, and now he had a name for it that he would think but not say.

The diorama was due in two days, as Tommy knew, and Mom knew, and Dad also knew. Dad had promised to fix the tree that the Cheshire cat would sit in. And he had! Tommy smiled upon seeing it.He had gathered the twigs and leaves and stayed up past his bedtime with Dad, trying to fashion a miniature tree out of these parts. But the glue wasn’t sticking no matter how long they held the pieces together. But Dad had done it. He showed Tommy the mess of wires and strings hidden by the leaves, explaining the principles of suspension.

“And here’s where the cat will sit – on this flat part of the branch,” said Dad, showing him a flattened ledge. Tommy wanted to touch everything on the tree and move away the leaves to see every detail, but didn’t want it to break. 

Against the background Tommy had drawn, it all looked better than he ever could have imagined. The real tree stood out among the two-dimensional ones he had colored, with spotted mushrooms here and there as well.

Pop appeared with the deck of cards.

“Now you’re sure you don’t want to do that part with the caterpillar smoking the pipe? Because I have-“

“No you don’t Dad, you don’t have anything,” said Thomas firmly.

“Ok you need the queen too? Queen, queen, where is she? Yeah, that broad’s always bossing the king around, always looking over his shoulder if I remember correctly.”

“She’s always yelling ‘off with their heads!’” said Tommy excitedly, waiting for Pop to pull out the final piece of the puzzle from the deck like a magician.

The next day at the house of women, it was officially time to finish the diorama. Mom handed him an old plastic doll with blonde hair in a blue dress and a tiny white apron she had sewn herself. Tommy had offered to help with the sewing, but Grandma was too worried about him sticking himself with the needle. This Alice looked much better than he had anticipated, her hair was even tied back with the smallest blue ribbon he had ever seen.

“And look at your backdrop – You even have the tiny mushrooms on here – and one big one – the one the Caterpillar sits on?”

“Yep!”

“What great attention to detail!” Said Mom with a smile. “Ok who else do we need?”

“The Cheshire cat!” he said excitedly. “He goes on this branch – Dad made it flat, so he won’t roll off.”

“Oh, look at that,” said Mom inspecting the tree’s special branch closely. “This is really good actually, I wonder how he did that,” she said seemingly to herself.

“Wires and suspension,” said Tommy, looking excitedly at Grandma who had come over with an orange cat figurine. He was going to get to draw a smile on it, a thing that seemed so forbidden, he wouldn’t believe it until he had the marker in his hand.

But true to her word, Grandma handed it over. Carefully, carefully he extended out the whiskers on either side into a smile. Not a smile that showed teeth, but a smile nonetheless. The women praised his handiwork. And with Tommy ceremoniously placing the cat on the branch, it was complete – Alice playing croquet with the Cheshire cat, King, and Queen. Not really playing, but holding her mallet, looking at the cat, a buffer between it and the king, and the king, a buffer between her and the queen.

This thing that had come together, that he would present in class, was its own house, his small piece of property, carried carefully by him from home to home, then home to school and home again. He would just have to decide which house to keep it at. He couldn’t bring it back and forth all the time, it was too fragile.