prose – Page 4 – wordandcolour

“View From the 20th Floor,” by Jo-Ann Zhou

content warning: abusive relationships

When the tiny rays of light were desperately grasping at the sky, when almost all the lights in the city beyond had turned black—that was when he came alive. His wine-stained teeth, the colour of dried blood caked into the crevices, would start to quiver as finally his lips moved at a rapid pace. At last, I would think. At last he is here. Here was the version of the man I liked and knew: interesting, articulate, prone to philosophical rants about metaphysics. He shone so much brighter than the version of himself with clean teeth—the version that only appeared when the sun was up, when the sky was too blue and bright—timid, uncertain, unwilling to express much more than the occasional nod by way of emotion.

I don’t know what drew me to him. Maybe it was because he was smart in ways that I wasn’t, and a few years older, and so completely unlike anyone I had ever met. I might never have met him if we hadn’t lived in the same building. He was funny: witty funny, laugh-out-loud-and-snort-with-laughter funny, but only in private when his teeth were stained from wine as we watched the sunrise from his window on the 20^th floor. Sometimes when we were with his friends he was funny, but that was after three pitchers of beer, when the bar floors were sticky. As everyone else’s words began to slur and grow fuzzy, his would grow sharp.

In the daylight, we didn’t talk. He avoided me. He didn’t know how to talk to me without a glass in his hand. I don’t know what the view looked like from the 20^th floor under blue skies. He would message me after his first glass in the evening, still not quite the version of himself that he would become a bottle later, but loosened up enough to ask for my presence. I probably should have known then that the bottle wouldn’t just make him funnier and louder and more confident.

I probably should have foreseen that after the first bottle, his hand would start reaching for the stapler, or the lamp, or the phone—knuckles white, hand shaking—as his wine-emboldened voice told me to get out or else. I don’t remember fighting. I just remember feeling utterly bewildered as we went from one moment chatting calmly and looking at the view of the sunrise to another where I was running out the door, wondering if the stapler might make contact with my head once my back was turned.

I’m glad I didn’t stay. We never really talked about why. Sometimes, after it was all over, I found myself back on the 20^th floor. I would stand in the doorway with a million unasked questions—but then I would turn around and take the elevator back down to my apartment on the 5^th floor. His door remained un–knocked upon and my questions all unanswered. Then I stopped going to the 20^th floor entirely.

After I moved out of the building, I would look up to the 20^th floor every time I walked past. I would think about how happy I was that I never found out what the view looked like from that window over the city when the sky was blue. A few years later, they built a new, taller building right in front of his window, so I suppose that view is gone. No one else will ever see the way the lights twinkled just so when the sun was coming up, glinting on his teeth stained the colour of dried blood.

these words by Jo-Ann Zhou were inspired by the art of Marcin Wolski

“Considering.”: New Prose by Tristen Sutherland

Once upon a time, there was a man on a ledge. Well, not a ledge. A balcony. Every day at dusk, like clockwork, the man stood on the balcony, staring out into the blue hazy expanse. Sometimes, he looked down, considering the 20-story drop. Sometimes, he considered jumping. The man had everything he’d ever wanted. His apartment was beautiful. His job was prestigious. His car was automated. And, yet, he considered the 20-story drop from his apartment balcony.

Once upon a time, there was young girl who would watch the man on the balcony, like clockwork. She would watch him standing there as he considered the urban twinkle of lights. She had frizzy hair and no freckles. She never understood why. All the people she knew had freckles and wore their hair in long ponytails. The girl’s mother had given up on combing through the girl’s hair years ago. Now, it sticks up in all directions, with a bow neatly placed by her ear as if to say, “Truly, we tried.” Once, the girl gathered the courage to ask her parents why she had frizzy hair and no freckles and they didn’t. Her mothers just glanced at each other, considering.

Once upon a time, on a particularly blue day, the man stood on his balcony, considering. The girl watched him. She noticed that his hair had gotten wilder and his dark eyes seemed more… Determined? Anxious? Afraid? The man looked across the horizon. It looked like the ocean, shades of Prussian blue, cerulean and hints of ochre swirling in and out of each other like a Van Gogh painting. His achievements would never change how people felt about him, the man finalized. Cursed with no freckles, frizzy hair and chestnut skin, he was hopeless. He considered. The girl watched attentively. The moon was full and its white light competed with the industrial glow of the city. The man tried to convince himself that the drop would be like jumping into the ocean. Quick. Easy. Painless. He considered. The girl began to worry. She thought of the man as a friend, her only friend with frizzy hair, no freckles and dark skin, like her. But the man was finished with considering. He took a deep breath and scanned his surroundings. This would be the last time he’d look at the horizon this would be the— He noticed a girl with frizzy hair and no freckles standing on a balcony next to his peering back at him.

Once upon a time, there was a man about to jump off a balcony. But he couldn’t. Not that night. Because a girl with frizzy hair and no freckles on a balcony next to his reminded him too much of himself. Instead, the man and the girl stood on their balconies, looking off into the Van Gogh sky. The girl was too nervous to speak. The man didn’t know what to say. So, there they stood, calm in each other’s presence. Calm. Of course, it wouldn’t last. The girl would go back inside to loving parents, who would never understand why the girl wanted freckles. The man would go back to his apartment, knowing that his skin would always hold him back. But in that moment, they were both calm. A unique unspoken solidarity was shared. So, there they stood. Considering.

these words by Tristen Sutherland were inspired by the work of Marcin Wolski

On Looking and Being Seen: “For Young Girls,” by Eileen Mary Holowka

Content Warning: Depression and creepy insect stories

Maggie used to write stories in the attic. That was back when she was a child, when she wasn’t allowed to leave the house and instead spent family gatherings curled up in strangers’ jackets on her parents’ bed. She would rub her face into them and try to find a home in each of the different scents: winter smokers, damp lavender, a flooded basement. She would rifle through the pockets, stroking keys to guess where they belonged and reading crumpled receipts.

These days she had trouble writing. There were too many parties to attend and they always took days to get over. She still rubbed up against strangers’ jackets but it never gave her the same joy. These days, the smells were too familiar and all new possibilities seemed to end with every touch.

Sometimes Maggie went home with the jackets. She liked the homes and the jackets more than the people inside them, but they were her only excuse in. Most of the time they would have sex and some of the time she would bleed after. It was a symptom of some condition she hadn’t been able to diagnose. It became a kind of performance art piece, bleeding onto other people’s beds. They were never appreciative of her art.

Maggie built sets. Mock kitchens with only three walls and trees with trapdoors. It was a dream job on the way to what she hoped could one day be economically sustainable. She moved around theatres invisibly, in all-black outfits that doubled as formal wear, and spent rehearsal breaks hiding in the wings watching the actors bicker like they were in a play.

The best part about casual sex was locking herself in the strangers’ bathrooms, before she had let them down with her leaking uterus, to go through their cupboards. She loved the belongings and rituals of others, finding out where they kept their extra toilet paper or whether they Q-tipped their ears. She never took anything or moved it out of place, just looked. She figured it would make her a better artist, or make her like that particular stranger better. She tried to imagine what a future in their home would look like, but it was always better the less she knew.

The doctors kept telling her there was nothing wrong, but they scheduled her an ultrasound anyways. The technician pressed down on Maggie’s full bladder while they both watched the screen. Maggie eagerly looked for something, a cyst or a tumour, as if it were a fetus. But there was nothing there, not even a child, to explain her problems. She walked out of the hospital past husbands and their swelling wives and felt more infertile than she’d ever felt in her life.

Her journey home was slow and heavy, despite or because of her emptiness. Even the trees were barren, she noticed. Autumn made her want to call her ex. She touched her phone, but it turned off as soon as she tapped his name. She had no idea where the bus stop was without Google and it took her an hour to walk home. It was dark and damp, and she looked into the lit-up windows of other people’s houses with longing. She called him later that week, several times until she got past his voicemail. When he heard her voice, he paused, and hung up.

The printed ultrasound results came the same day. Everything was fine, but sounded deadly. She read the paper aloud to Anne over Skype. Apparently there is fluid in my cul-de-sac. Did you know you had a cul-de-sac in your uterus?

That explains your pain, Anne replied. Cars keep getting stuck.

Imagine the tiny little houses.

Little moms and dads.

God, even my diseases are domestic.

Maggie liked her parents and visited them often. They would cook her more food than she could eat and fill her full of enough tea to make her bus ride home unbearable. They tried to get her to clean her toys out of the attic, but instead she just hid in the back and watched spiders build webs around her Barbies. She didn’t have the heart to throw them out, nor the desire to clean them, so she just watched instead.

The attic was full of garbage treasures: VHS tapes of dance recitals and episodes of I Love Lucy; Mom’s broken mint green typewriter; her grandmother’s wedding photos. Maggie’s dollhouse sat in the corner near the window, covered in mud from where the roofers had gone wild. She used to imagine herself as the prettiest doll and would dress and undress her mock self for hours. Doll Maggie had always been intelligent and composed. She went to parties, her face always painted into a smile.

Maggie was scared to touch her doll self, even to save her from the wreckage of shingle bits. She had never intended to stop playing, but eventually everyone else did and the lonely, imaginative Saturdays became guilty pleasures, with an emphasis on the guilt. She knew that when she grew up she would call herself Margaret. She just didn’t know when that growing up would come.

As a child, she was good at being seen and not heard. She could never keep up with her family’s political conversations and figured she must not have any opinions. She told her father her theory and he laughed her down. She decided to drop that opinion as well.

Maggie brought a man home to her parents once. He was tall and professional and liked to put her down. She could see the confusion in her mother’s eyes, as she placed the plate in front of the man like some kind of offering. She could tell her mother would rather throw it in his face, but was trying to treat her daughter like a woman. Maggie would have preferred to be chastised like a child and she felt like one as she made eye contact with her mother and shrugged.

His name was Douglas. He always told her she was a good listener, but mostly he was just a good talker. He was a writer and told Maggie she should be a writer too and that he could edit her work if she liked, because it could use some editing. He called her Margaret, said it was a good writer’s name. It sounded so good in his mouth that she felt obligated to keep kissing him. She adored him and he adored her, except when he didn’t.

So I just googled it, Maggie texted Anne, and it says the cul-de-sac is also called “Pouch of Douglas” cuz of some guy named Douglas who “discovered” it I guess.

OF COURSE.

Even my insides belong to dudes.

Dudes named Douglas. Had to be a Douglas.

It’s always a Douglas.

The last time Maggie and Anne Skyped, the internet began cutting out in the middle of their chat about depression. Anne’s comforting words fractured into alien xylophone fragments and Maggie broke down laughing.

She hadn’t always been so sad. She read that birth control could be making her this way, but the doctor said that was just part of the deal. So she stayed on the meds and took selfies instead. Except they never looked beautiful or poetic enough, like Anne’s. Instead they were unnerving, lacking the adequate amount of performance for the camera.

Early in her career, Maggie had tried acting. She was excellent when she had to play a quiet school girl, but unconvincing when she tried the role of a confident lesbian. She realized she was only good at performing herself, her own intimacy, and went back to facilitating the public intimacy of others instead.

During her long distance relationships, Maggie always watched herself on the screen, instead of her lover. Her own tiny image was too distracting. Her long-distance self was cold and hard and contained behind glass. These days, she was somewhat softer. At least, she leaked.

She rarely brought men home but, after watching an episode of Sex and the City, the idea of having sex next to the open window appealed to her. It wasn’t the lovemaking that made it so enticing, but the idea that the neighbours might be watching, thinking of her as some sort of Samantha sex-goddess and wishing for her life.

As a teenager, Maggie had worked in her father’s office building where she’d spend the morning filing papers and the afternoons staring into the windows of the apartment building across the street. She’d map out the tenants’ rituals: the old lady’s lunchtime smoke, the child’s after-school milk and cookies, the perfectly trimmed bachelor’s quick change into evening clothes. She always hoped she might catch them looking back her way, but the window was likely reflective.

On one of her dates, she took a guy to an art gallery, but ended up coming down with diarrhea. He gave up on her after she spent too long in the washroom, and sent her some sort of inflammatory text about her thighs, or ass or something. It was her gut saving her, she realized, because after she recovered she stumbled into a Nan Goldin exhibit she knew he would have ruined. She spent two hours in the room, gazing at other people’s wounds, and crying. She went home knowing she should write down her thoughts, but ended up in bed instead, with an old recording of Judy Garland covering Singing in the Rain playing in the background on her parents’ passed-down wedding gift television set.

The next date was even more hopeless. She spent hours preparing, trimming her pubic hair into the toilet with safety scissors and wondering if other girls had better methods. However, as soon as she met him, she knew it was over. His profile picture beard was gone and he kept calling her Meg. She smiled and pushed through it, walking 16 km across the city with him until she finally came up with an excuse to leave. She went home and watched Rear Window on loop until she fell asleep.

Most nights before bed, she would scroll through Facebook, Twitter, /r/Relationships, and YouTube to watch the lives of others. Sometimes she would comment, but normally she just acted as a witness, eager to see a glimmer of emotion, something beyond herself. In the mornings she scrolled through Instagram, pretending that what she saw were just static portraits, but inevitably identifying with and reading into every one.

One night, an ant crawled into her ear while she was sleeping. At first she thought the crunchy popping sound was some kind of air bubble, but she was unable to pop it. She fished around for awhile before deciding to look in the mirror. Its tiny black legs were just visible as they reached around for a way out. She stared in icy panic, suddenly wishing for her mother or a roommate who could pull it out of her. The responsibility of the task ran over her like spilled milk, mundane but devastating, as she forced her trembling fingers towards his tiny body, burning her eyes open so she wouldn’t lose him.

Afterward, he crawled around her fingers and she watched with a kind of respect, understanding now that he had wanted to be there even less than she’d wanted him to. She put the ant on the windowsill and crawled back into her bed. Her room was yellows, blues, and beige and smelled of her home. On the walls hung postcards and letters from her friends. It was kind of lovely, she realized, this place entirely her own.

The next day, the subway was stalled due to a suicide. She took out a notebook and began sketching the man sitting across from her. She sketched his pale face and sunken features, shaping them into a story. He looked on the verge of breakdown, as though he had just suffered some great loss. She ripped out the page and passed it to him, a gesture of friendship, empathy, or just mutual boredom.

He took the picture from her and squinted at it, shaking his head.

What’s this? he asked.

A drawing I did of you, just now, Maggie answered, smiling.

This isn’t me, he said, and the subway started again.

these words by Eileen Mary Holowka were inspired by the art of Marcin Wolski

New Prose: “January 20” by Ajay Mehra

The knurled cloth handles of Nicos’ hamper cut into his right hand. The straps are connected all the way to the base of the bag and the weight of the laundry keeps pushing them apart. They’re too short, now that the laundry is folded and holding the bag to its shape. You switch hands but there isn’t enough time to rub the indentations out of the left hand before the pain in the right hand is impossible.

Nicos puts the hamper down on a bench facing the front window of a coffee shop. People sit looking out onto the street—at the sidewalk and the bench and the parked cars and the road and the storefronts across the road that you can’t make out what they are from here. You have to rub your hands with each other and look out as well. How does anyone sit on this bench with the coffee shop staring them in the face. You’d have to seem surprised all the time that you’d caught someone sipping or biting or reading.

You can’t sit next to your laundry on a bench. It looks like you’re waiting for someone to come help you, because people can’t tell it’s done. Is it still laundry when it’s done, and folded. It’s laundry when it’s dirty, and while it’s getting clean, and while you fold it. It’s clothes when you put it away. You can sit next to clothes. Clothes are like shopping.

Nicos had sat next to half his laundry at the laundromat. Only because all the machines were full. You can sit next to your laundry in the laundromat, if the machines are full and you have enough for a good-size load. And if it’s a clean laundromat. How do laundromats get dirty. Car washes get dirty and the dirty ones have the strongest sprayers so you go to the dirtiest ones. Luckily the closest car wash is filthy.

You don’t care about how a hamper carries when the machines are in the building. Or when the laundromat at the corner is clean. Who sends you to a dirty laundromat. There isn’t another laundromat between here and home, so you have to buy another new hamper. The store that sells hampers isn’t on the way either.

these words by Ajay Mehra were inspired by
the art of Pasha Bumazhniy

“Code Switching of the New Romance,” new prose by Kate Shaw

Spanish cropped up in their discourse in a very predictable way. Their relationship was established in English — her first language, his second — and Spanish tended to couch the more intimate sentiments. For her, it created distance — both from the topic and from him — when they traipsed into territory that was rife with vulnerability, con dudas.

—Pues ¿por qué crees que te sientes así?

Spanish, in case asking directly about his emotions was too big a threat to his masculinidad, to the machismo of his culture. Spanish to distance herself from a fair question, but one that asked for vulnerability from a new partner who maybe wasn’t ready to give it. Spanish, porque tenía miedo.

She used code-switching as a buffer, a way to protect herself when she took a tentative step into the thick haze that was an infinity of potential futures for them.

It was different for him.

—Te escondes con mi idioma.

He didn’t fear that haze. The lack of clarity was something he simply accepted as inevitable, even beautiful in its incertidumbre. His Spanish was meant to pierce it boldly, shoot it through with light — aunque efímera — so they could both see, at least for a second. See each other.

The contexts overlapped almost perfectly. If you didn’t know them — as individuals, as partners — you might think the role Spanish played for each of them was identical. You had to have a much more personal perspective to see that what allowed her to hide was what most allowed him to show.

these words by Kate Shaw were inspired by the photography of Alison Scarpulla

From the author: “What spoke to me most about the photo was the haziness of the image and the reflections. I linked the lack of visual clarity in the photo to the uncertainty of the future shared by the two characters, which they approach in different ways. The idea that a reflection appears identical to the source it reflects without actually being the same is connected to the fact that the characters use Spanish in the same contexts but with very different intentions.”

“Sleeves,” new prose by Charlotte Joyce Kidd

She stood on the edge of the bedroom. The walls, floors, and light were grey. She was wearing her shoes. The room was cluttered. Some of the clutter was hers, natural to her. Her uniform lay crumpled vertically in a corner by the closet; she’d stepped directly out of it and into her party dress that night. The covers were pulled back on the bed. The sheets were unruffled and unstained. Only the pillows spoke: she had owned the same two since early undergrad, and she stacked them to sleep alone, spread them for a guest. They looked especially thin and silent, offered no apology to her where she stood in the doorway.

She nudged a foot into the room. The toe of her boot landed between a pair of tights and a wool sock. The tights were torn, but that didn’t mean anything; almost all of her tights were torn. Still, something about their twisted angles, the way they were tangled into each other, suggested they’d been the victims of something. Stop, she thought. It’s only because you know what happened. She tried to open her eyes wider. The walls were covered in drawings and poetry made by people who had been her friends. The colours now seemed ludicrously bold, broadcasting a goofy happiness that was too tempting to crush. The uniform was in the corner to her left. She stepped past it. On the floor by the edge of the bed was the necklace she’d been wearing that night. The clasp was broken. Two beads had come off. One was hiding in the shadows under the bed and one was halfway across the room. Her eyes flew from the abandoned bead to where, floating gently, a strip of frayed, gauzy material was snagged on a corner of her nightstand drawers. She climbed across the bed, drawn to it and not caring about her shoes on the furniture. Strips of translucent white fabric lifted gently from the floor and swirled around her head. She tried to fight them away as they surrounded her, nudging her and blocking her view. Then they settled back down to the ground, ballooning and dropping like baby spiders’ webs. On the other side of them, between her and the door, lay the shell of their progenitor, the torso of the see-through dress she’d been wearing that night.

Then it happened quickly. She remembered where everything was and moved fast to see it all: the lamp knocked from the nightstand, her underwear balled up by the leg of the bed, then dark and square and too concrete, his passport (she’d dropped it in a mailbox days later, hoping that it would find its way back to him so that she could continue pretending nothing had happened) and then she crouched down and looked under the bed, and as always, the corner of the bed frame was broken, the wood splintered, the slats halved. The mattress still drooped in this spot. Everything’s here, everything’s here. Breathlessly, she searched harder. She couldn’t move anything much; she lifted things and put them down again, cursing herself for never tidying up, she opened drawers and shifted stacks of books and touched the tights that sent pained shivers up her arms into her spine. She looked under the covers and then started craning her neck and searching impossible places: the ceiling, the full-length mirror (her own reflection), were they hanging from the curtain rod? Please please please. She could hear her alarm ringing. She shut it off and willed herself back. Again. Door, tights, beads. This time, the pieces of torn dress stayed in their place. There was the dress itself, but where were the sleeves? Where had they gone? The sleeves were loose and gauzy, like the rest of the dress, and they had elastics at the wrists so that night, when she’d been dancing, arms in the air, the dress had billowed around her and then swayed away without a care in the world and where had they gone? Had he taken them? The sleeves of her dress? As she slipped away, she thought she saw them outside the window, floating over the tops of smoky buildings far away.

this prose by Charlotte Joyce Kidd was inspired by the art of Alison Scarpulla

“A Field Guide to Fairies,” new prose by Samantha Lapierre

When I was young, my mom would dress me in a warm coat and bring me out into the autumn woods next to our cottage, and we would look for fairies.

In my mittened hands I held a pen and notebook. My mom held a pack of cigarettes. We would traipse through the crunchy leaves, our boots sinking into the soft ground. We would weave in and out of the birch bark trees, and our dog, Pal, was never far behind.

My mom would tell me that fairies live in small nooks and crannies in the woods. They live in trees, they play under the large tops of mushrooms, and they are magical. They are friends with birds, bunnies, and other creatures.

I’d spot fairy houses and jot down the sightings, and my mom would spot some too. She was at her gentlest during fairy expeditions. She would sip coffee from a travel mug, hold my hand, and listen to my excited chatter before it was time to leave.

When I grieve for my mom now, I grieve for her at her gentlest. The leaves in the treetops turn orange. A chickadee calls out from somewhere in the cityscape. I try not to grieve too hard, or too angrily. When I smell cigarette smoke in the cold fall air, I am still a girl wrapped up tight in her secondhand coat, surrounded by fairies.

this prose by Samantha Lapierre was inspired by the art of Alison Scarpulla

New prose by Annie Rubin, “We Are Survivors”

It felt like dying, only you’re expected to reincarnate much faster: rapid loss of breath, chest heaving to compensate. Dizzy. The room would fade in and out. I watched myself descend into fight or flight, an encumbered observer over my own body.

At fifteen, I asked to be separated from that part of my identity rooted in fear. Was it possible to unlink? Could I attain the division of self: an existence without the weight of imminent extinction?

My father felt it too. He brought me tea one night, bourbon and honey. It Will Help You Sleep, he promised. What If I Die, I asked. You Will, he said. But Not For A Long Time. We Are Survivors, You And I.

They gave me Zoloft to stop the shaking and Seroquel to help me sleep and Prozac when I had the urges to go to temple when it rained and they gave me Lexapro for the side-effect depression. They gave me Klonopin and Ativan and Valium and Xanax was my favorite; it made the room spin the least.

The effort was in solid determination to mute what so viscerally tied me to my ancestors: that brink-of-death anxiety we all know so deeply. It ebbs and flows through our veins tethering us to each other, the Jewish people.

Maybe we didn’t speak Hebrew at our Seders but the bloodlines flowed. We were descendants of those lucky enough to hold on, who knew they had to keep living. At family gatherings, the room would get silent. Why Is Our Family So Small? someone asked once. The Rest Of Us Were Killed.

But the drugs seemed to perpetuate more drugs; we were desperate for some kind of medicalized solution, capitalizing on our ingrained identity. Could we learn to escape? Or to ever quell the pharmaceutical self?

The healing had to begin through the (re)discovery of voice. Shrouded by years of institutionalized hate, the beauty of our culture must manifest itself in celebration, unapologetic lighting candles and sharing kindred spirit. Singing and loving and never- forgetting, we must come out of hiding. I want to hear each voice.

this prose by Annie Rubin, “We Are Survivors,” was inspired by the art of Christine Kim

From Annie: “This work is inspired by the image of a character looking poised and overwhelmed, the base, supporting a dilapidated castle. The figure represents the protagonist’s Jewish ancestry in the strife and struggle of the Jewish people, who bear a weight that has been carried through generations. Striking colours provided a glimmer of hope through the subversion of institutionalized hatred, confiding in the expansive possibility of self-expression.”

New prose, “Macaroons,” by Erin Flegg

I stopped being able to see the art in the situation. The crack down the centre of the table where the two halves came together was always clogged with the leftover crusts of things, clumps of flour and milk, the hardened white sinews from the inside of a pepper. I would tear fingernails trying to dig it out, doing so almost absently in the mornings while she made pancakes or slices of ham or sometimes just peeled fruit with a sharp knife, right on the table, leaving the light translucent spray that comes from lifting the tough skin of an orange.

She hated to shop for groceries. She never said it out loud but I think it had something to do with the fact of money, the tangible, generally negative change that happened to her material worth in the world after paying for a block of nice cheese. How it took the romance out of the thing. She didn’t believe in saying that kind of thing out loud. I came home from work one day in the winter with a bag full of big hunks of white chocolate. I had no intention of eating it and I knew she didn’t like it. It was a small test, I suppose. To see if she could resist something that should have been so sumptuous, resist turning it into something she could hold up, if only to me, and declare through her own culinary grace that this, whatever it was, colourless, malleable, opaque stuff, had romance. Even if neither one of us did. I sat on the floor by the stove, my back against the island and my feet pressing against the dishwasher, while she melted the chocolate in a metal bowl over a pot of water. She wouldn’t tell me what she was doing and I stopped just short of accusing her of having no idea herself what she was making. It probably would have given me away. In the end she made macaroons, searching the baking cupboard and unwrapping open packages of ingredients from their grocery-bag coverings to find the coconut shreds and oatmeal, mixing them into the thick puddle. She coloured it with a pinch of curry powder and cinnamon. Antioxidants, she said, flicking a bit of the brown dust onto me from above. I grabbed her by the ankle and bit her calf, still tense from pressing her weight forward into the stove. She jumped to one side and accidentally flung the wooden spoon out of the pot. It dropped molten clumps of chocolate on the floor and the top of the island and then hit the back wall. Like a baby after a fall, she waited wide-eyed for me to show her what kind of tone we were going to use to move forward. I got up and went over to the wall, sat down again and started to lick the spoon clean. I smiled without looking at her and she started to laugh. She threw her tea towel at me and used her finger to swipe up the drips from the countertop. I just sucked on the wet spoon, grinding bits of coconut between my back teeth.

this prose by Erin Flegg, “Macaroon,” was inspired by the art of Christine Kim

New prose by Finn Morgan, “Home Enough”

CW: abuse mention (child)

A peach morning, shards of grass sneaking into the sidewalk, branches swaying dull and dead. I arrive at the building gate and I am shaking, shaking still; should have kept the winter coat. I call the number saved from the last round of search scrolls and feigned phone pep. The concierge answers: “I’ll be right there!”

I am courteous, perform norm, stand straight and feminine, chuckling at a stray comment on tattoos and irresponsibility; be in-group, be in-group, be in-group to get what you need.

In the elevator, unmoving, with steady smiles. My tired eyelids linger closer shut with each rumble conveying us up, up. I hear the crash and the sobbing; the anxious adrenaline snaps me to wake. Concierge and I meet glances and she, with a light nod, softens her smile. The elevator sounds at the 22nd. “It’s right over this way,” she says, pointing, as the door rolls slowly open.

The hall is well-lit but there are scuffs on the wall. From neighbours? Is the building not maintained? How much can I afford to care? How much does care cost? Concierge fidgets the key and jerks the door. A good lock. The apartment inside is fine. Nice view. Thick walls. Clean enough. Big enough. Enough is enough sometimes. Concierge points out the kitchenette, the fridge, the bathroom, the balcony. I remove my coat as we look around. I yawn and I hear a small sniffle as we head towards the bedroom.

The concierge gets a call. Issue on the 4th, will be right back.

I don’t expect the shaking and unsettled breathing to leave with her but I am still disappointed when it doesn’t. I open the room door, feel empty. I close my eyes, knowing exactly what will appear: a child with thick ringlets, crouched and sniffling in the corner of the open closet. This child lives in every empty room I visit. Ever since our first room was emptied. I know them well. Sometimes they tell me when I need to leave, sometimes they just need to be held. I am tired and this room is wide enough, sunny enough, so I tell them:

“She won’t find you here.”

“But what if she does?”

“There are locks on the door.”

“But you’ll still hear her.”

“We’ll drown her out.”

“How?”

“Music. The Shower. However we can.”

“And what if we can’t?”

“We’ll survive.”

“I’m still scared.”

“I know. Me too.”

“What do we do?”

“What we can.”

“Will it be enough?”

“It has to be.”

When Concierge returns I ask to start the paperwork. Home is wherever I’m without you.

this prose by Finn Morgan, “Home Enough,” was inspired by the art of Christine Kim

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