We Meet

When you were little, someone had given you a wallet with a horse’s head in profile so you had decided you liked horses. Your parents got you riding lessons at a local stable where you spent most of the afternoon in a pool, supervised by disinterested lifeguards related in various ways to the people who ran the camp. When you did get to be around horses, the instructors told you to be extremely careful because they might kick if you came up behind them. You didn’t know at the time, but it had recently come up at a family lunch that the week before you had gone to the camp, a kid had been knocked into a coma.

It was later, on an activity day at a resort you attended with your family, that you really came to fear horses. There was an excursion and all the kids went by bus to a ranch so that all the parents could golf or fuck or argue. At the ranch, a huge horse with a white patch between his eyes butted your stomach and chest with his muzzle. The ranch hand’s explanation was that the horse was asking you for food. If he’d been a smaller animal maybe you would have been charmed, but there was substantial force to his nuzzling, so substantial that you had no trouble recognizing how quickly and with what ease the animal could overpower you, harm you, kill you. You never even climbed on the horse’s back and the stable had no other animal available for you to ride so you did what? “I don’t remember.”

“You know, I’ve never ridden a horse,” I told you.

“What?”

“It’s just a tattoo.”

“Really?”

“Well, sort of. My last name means someone who shoes horses.” I said.

“So it’s not really just a tattoo,” you said.

“Well, I guess my name’s just a name though, right? I mean a horse means a lot of things.”

“I’ve been using that running horse emoji a lot,” you told me. You used it when someone texted you to say they were running late, or when your sister texted you to say that she and her husband had finally cleared out the room that they planned on turning into a nursery in their small condominium. You used it to express excitement when your friend invited you to go see Bruce Springsteen at the Air Canada Centre.

I don’t know, but I found you charming as you know now. I was worried that you were letting too much of your mind out to me, maybe. Like that it might become overwhelming or exhausting. Or that you would run out of thoughts to share.

The first time we “did it”—fucked, or “made love,” or whatever—I thought of a horse snorting and thrashing and racing around, white froth which was its sweat, I guess, clumped here and there on its skin as it passed the camera. I say camera of course because I’m thinking of something from a film. In my imagination or memory, it’s from a Terrence Malick film.

You started talking about guns because of the six-shooter tattooed on my other wrist. When you were nearly six your grandfather had let you fire his shotgun at a tomato juice can nestled into the crotch of a tree and your mother, who had left you with him as she ran errands, had arrived in time to hear the shot and had nearly killed your grandfather, probably would have killed him if it wasn’t the death part of guns that so profoundly offended her.

You told me that that same grandfather had used that same gun—maybe it was a rifle—to kill a bouvier des flandres puppy, nearly full grown, whose temperament had turned mean. Later, when you started reading through forty years of your grandfather’s daily journals, you discovered that he’d killed the bouvier earlier the same day that he let you fire the gun.

He also had a toy six-shooter that he had helped you put real bullets into.

And when you were little—a little older, though, and with the permission of your parents—you’d been skeet shooting with your best friend, whose father hunted ducks, mostly. You were good at it. At least you remembered being good at it. Meaning you hit things.

I had on a pair of Ray Bans that I’d found on the street. Unfortunately, whoever had lost them had a prescription that was a bit too strong for my eyes, but I liked how they looked perched on my head. Anyway, I pulled them down because I didn’t want you to see my eyes when I told you that I had the gun tattooed on my arm as a way to reclaim the idea of guns. Through the sunglasses you looked clear, but much farther away.

“Reclaim? Why?”

I explained how, you know, people reclaimed language that had been used against them.

“Someone used a gun against you?”

I told you how when I was twelve, my father was held up at a gas station. A robbery.

You did this blinking thing. It was the first time I’d seen you do it, but I’ve seen you do it since. It’s like you are trying to bring the world into focus. Figuratively. “With a gun?” you asked.

“He was killed.”

“Oh my God. I’m sorry.”

“Why? You didn’t do it.”

You looked at some filthy spot on the floor of the club. “No,” you said.

A member of the band turned on an amp and the sound of a chord swelled briefly into the club. The rest of the band took their places behind instruments and microphones.

The story of my father’s murder was true and painful, but I told it with some frequency. There were other details, which eventually you memorized. Like, “He had twenty dollars in his wallet.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Did they take it?”

“Yes.” Or, “It was as a gas station right by my parents’ house.”

“Did th—”

The band started their first song. I got up off my stool, grabbed my beer from the tall table beside me and put my lips up to your ear. “What’s that?” I shouted as gently as I could over the hammering guitar.

You swallowed before you turned your head and stretched your neck to bring your mouth to my ear. “Did they move?”

I shook my head.

You blinked again. This time it was like something had suddenly become clear. “I’m sorry. I guess I mean did your mom move?”

I shook my head and smiled gently. I found the modification charming. Almost thoughtful. But also very strange. As if you thought—though I know you didn’t think—that changing “they” to “your mom” could leap back in time to pull my mother out of the funk that followed. Funk isn’t the word. Crippling fear, anxiety, depression, shock. PTSD. “No. We didn’t move,” I said, but our heads weren’t close enough together for you to hear me.

You looked worried. Mouthed, “What?”

I shook my head, No. It’s nothing. Nevermind.

You leaned your head close to mine, your mouth near my ear. You shouted, “What did you say?” then looked at me, all carefully rendered concern.

My hesitation, my reluctance, was real. Eventually, I leaned in to say, “It’s okay. Seriously. We can talk after the band.”

We did keep talking after the band.

But first we stood there. I stood stiffer than usual. You too, I realize in retrospect. Someone watching silent video of the two of us at that show couldn’t have guessed that the band was good, that there were grooves. A few songs in, you finished your beer, held the empty bottle in the air in front of me—closer than it appeared through the prescription Ray Bans—and when I looked at you, your face was asking if I wanted another. You pointed at the bottle, just to make sure I understood. I nodded, Yes. You went to the bar. I finished my beer while a welcome warmth started somewhere near the bottom of my ribs and spread out. I returned the Ray Bans to their nest in my hair. 

We stood closer as we finished our second beers.

The band finished and our conversation went on to cover Bill Callahan, a.k.a. Smog, and his lines “skin mags in the brambles/for the first part of my life/I thought women had orange skin” which you said the pin-up girl tattoo on my left arm reminded you of and which (the lines) reminded you of your own earliest exposure to Playboys and Hustlers or whatever stashed under a log down a dead-end dirt lane between your neighbour’s house and their neighbours on the other side or in a pile of leaves behind your mom’s best friend’s house. In response to a question I asked you inspired by your anecdotes about the skin mags, first you, then I talked about the teachers we wish we could have kissed or fucked or who we wish could have been our parents. At this point, the fact that we would soon sleep together was becoming obvious. The friends we’d come with drifted to the corners of the club. We went on. You described the bedroom you grew up in, one wall covered in Sunshine Girls a classmate gave you, in—you realized as you told me—some strange flirtation, probably. I described the different favourite band posters from different points in my evolution as a music lover. I asked you about where you lost your virginity. It was in your basement bedroom in the house you moved to with your mom and sister when your parents got divorced. It happened on a summer afternoon after a walk by the Sixteen Mile Creek a few weeks before you moved out on your own. You asked me where I lost mine. It was a bathroom at a party after the person I was with, not dating but talking to, someone I knew from school, confessed that they were a virgin despite the story they’d made up for their friends and I said that I too was a virgin, and while I wasn’t so ashamed that I made a secret of it, that I would be happy to break the ice or come of age or come with someone else—or whatever it took to lose my virginity—so we snuck into the bathroom and locked the door and fumbled our way through it while people banged on the door and speculated about who was taking so long before being swept back into the party by whatever.

We were among the last to leave the club. Your friends had left, my friends had left. The bands had loaded out and the bartender had turned on the lights. We held hands down the stairs from the venue and we walked a block in no direction. When you asked where we were going, I kissed you under a streetlight. The beer on my breath must have neutralized the beer on your breath because I tasted you. Your taste is like oatmeal with milk and brown sugar. Sure, sometimes the milk is sour. Or the oatmeal is thin. And in the morning there is something off in there, like maybe an unfinished bowl of oatmeal got dumped into the compost bin and while it remains the most prominent smell, the rotting vegetables and leftovers and the drying coffee grinds are an unpleasant counter-scent.

A streetcar rattled by and we interrupted that first kiss and walked down the first residential street we came to. In a parkette we found, I backed you into a play structure and held your head with both hands and looked at you. You were expectantly expressionless, your mouth open, your breath shallow. You shivered. We continued our kiss, this time more forceful and purposeful. With your teeth, you gently held onto my lower lip as I pulled back to change angles and I nearly came.

I knew I didn’t want to have sex that night, though. I don’t know why. Maybe I knew there was enough to savour already. Maybe I wanted the first time to be special. Maybe it was just that it was too late, way too late in the night and I needed the few hours of sleep I could still get before I went to my mom’s place to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday. “I have to go.”

“Uh—” You shook violently. “Okay.” I put my hand to your sternum, my fingers brushing your clavicle. Your heart beat like it was oversized, a horse’s heart or an elephant’s. Elephants are beautiful creatures, you know.

“I have family shit tomorrow.”

You nodded.

I kissed you, kept my one hand against your chest so you wouldn’t blow away, then I put my free hand between your legs. You moaned into my mouth at a frequency that vibrated and warmed my ribcage. I moved my hand to your right pocket, squeezed my fingers past the hem and pulled out your phone. I pulled my lips from yours.

With your eyes closed, your head leaned forward like our lips were magnetized.

I woke your phone up, tried to open it, but it was password protected. I held it out to you for you to unlock it, but you told me your passcode. You had to tell me twice, I was so unprepared for this openness. I went to your contacts and added my name and phone number. I checked it twice to make sure I hadn’t mistyped something. “I should be done at my mom’s by, like, eight at the latest.”

“Can I text you?”

“Can I come to your place?”

“Yes,” you whispered and shook.

“Walk me to the streetcar?”

You agreed. We held hands like we were new to it, trying different positions to find which brought us closest, which felt best. You waited for the streetcar with me. You leaned against the shelter’s glass. I faced you and let your fingers explore my knuckles, my nails, my fingers, the lines on my palms. My breathing was shallow. Then I explored your hands. You blinked away tears or sleep.

We heard the streetcar’s metallic call as it stopped two blocks away, its three front lights looking right at us.

“Text me as soon as I get on the streetcar, please. So we make sure.”

“I’ll text you now.”

“Yeah.”

You looked strange lit by the phone’s screen. You wrote your full name and I pulled out my phone to wait for it to buzz through. It did. We kissed again, kissed until the streetcar’s lights were brightening one side of us.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“Later today,” you said.

I looked back once as I climbed the streetcar's steps. You smiled. I stood above an empty seat so I could watch you as the vehicle pulled away. You stood there watching me for a long enough time that I didn’t see you turn and point yourself towards home.

Toronto, July-Aug 2016

Emoji sequence: Eleanora Ferrari

Story: Lee Sheppard

Behind This Door

Ward had been lying there, awake. From his hotel room, he could see the clouds getting lighter behind the Cathedral of St. Mary of The Assumption up on Gough and he felt he finally had permission to get out of bed. He was here to have a break from the problems that seemed to be the air he breathed back home. So far, that only worked during the day. During his waking hours, he should say. Ward’s sleep was still being interrupted by repetitive, persistent dreams about his ex and his children and his new, almost completely empty house, which he rented from a lovely, possibly single, former colleague. He hated clichés like, “Wherever you go, there you are,” but there it was and that was probably the best way to explain what was going on.

He got dressed, a sweater for San Francisco’s summer chill, new blue jeans that fit fashionably, if somewhat uncomfortably. His thighs hurt from walking something like—what was it Google Maps said? 20 km? He’d seen the Mission District, Dolores Park, Haight Street, Amoeba Music, Golden Gate Park, the Pacific Ocean. Ward had worn new shoes, not wanting to walk around this cool city in his sensible sneakers. His desperately red high-top Chuck Taylors were likely amongst the worst possible shoes for epic strolls. Not that he had actually intended to walk so far when he’d set out. Still, he had known he would be walking.

Ward sat on the bed and put on his walking shoes. If feet could sigh relief, could sigh at all, they would have let out a long exhale, maybe even choked back some tears, as they were embraced by their old, uncool friends.

He threw his copy of David Simon’s Homicide, a notebook and a pen into his World Famous canvas shoulder bag. He’d found it at the bottom of a box with an old rotary phone, some drawing pens, a Gumby figurine and various other old shit when he was moving out.

In front of the mirror, Ward stopped. He adjusted his shoulder bag. He looked at himself and tried see himself as handsome. He needed a haircut.

The hotel was nice enough, but it wasn’t a place Ward could really make his own, a place anyone could make their own, he didn’t imagine. It was in the Japanese neighbourhood and its décor was “Japanese”—like an ink drawing of a horse instead of the standard issue hotel flower painting—and the tub in Ward’s en suite was exotically deep. Perfectly cool, perfectly ventilated, nearly scentless, clean, the hotel was to a home like a mannequin was to a person. Even dressed up like a bedroom or a bathroom, even a Japanese bedroom or bathroom, a hotel room maintained a mannequin’s stiff flatness. That dramatic uprightness.

The hallway reminded Ward of his ex—behind each door was one of the lives without him he had dreamed about over the last months. On the carpet, there was a room-service tray. Finger- and lip-smudged champagne flutes stood awkwardly beside a stainless steel ice bucket and an open, presumably empty bottle. The elevator was free of people, but in the lobby, some of the housekeeping staff had started their work. They all wished Ward a good morning and he thanked them or wished them a good morning or nodded.

Outside, the cold air startled him back into his body. His legs ached properly, like fit, healthy legs that had walked a long way. His feet felt okay. Ward blew his nose into his handkerchief. It was one his ex bought him before they’d had kids, a Japanese wave pattern, actually. Ward put it back in his pocket and breathed a deep lungful of July in San Francisco.

When he turned north on Fillmore, Ward starting singing Pavement’s “Fillmore Jive” to himself. Ward looked at himself in a store window. When Stephen Malkmus wrote the song he was years younger than Ward was that morning. Ward walked on, and even though something at the heart of “Fillmore Jive” was heavy it warmed his vocal chords and soothed his hurts.

It was his second morning at the coffee shop, his second morning being greeted by the brash synthesized chimes triggered by the door. He checked the time on his phone. Yesterday he had been an hour later and showered when he arrived. The girl was working again, though. Her dark hair and tan skin offset her light green eyes in that way, like the National Geographic cover girl. This girl, the one in the coffee shop, wasn’t a girl. Maybe she was the daughter of the man whom because of his work ethic and impatience Ward assumed owned the shop, and whom because of the small red and white flag with the cedar tree protruding from behind the flat screen TV mounted in the corner of the room Ward assumed was Lebanese.

“Americano, please?” Ward asked the woman.

“What?” she said. She looked confused.

“Um, an Americano. You have espresso drinks, right?”

She waved her palm at Ward and turned. She pressed her fingers against her ear. “Yes? I’m sorry,” she said, facing away. Ward noticed the white, kinked wire interrupting her jaw line, brushing against an exposed bit of collarbone and disappearing into the valley between her breasts.

The man who might be the owner came over and said, “Yes.” He was clearly annoyed, but obviously not with Ward.

The woman disappeared into the back through an open doorway.

Ward ordered his Americano again.

The screaming synthesizer’s attempt at chimes, made the man look towards the door. The man smiled. “Hello.”

Walking up to the counter with an ease that seemed both subconscious and studied was a slender black man in grey slacks and a blue shirt with an open collar. He smiled and nodded. “Adnan.”

“My friend.”

Ward mouthed the word “Hi,” and nodded when the black man made eye contact.

“Good morning.”

Adnan, the probable owner, called “Haifa,” and in a few seconds another, equally lovely woman, this one younger, maybe young enough to be called a girl still, came out from the open doorway, sticking a pencil into a hasty bun at the back of her head. “Yes?”

“Americano for this gentleman,” Adnan told her.

“I’ll have one, too,” the black man said.

“Hi Richard,” Haifa said to the black man.

“Good morning, Haifa.”

“You’re early today,” she said.

“Yeah. Got some paper work I need to finish up.”

Ward ignored the conversation. He let himself fall in love with the ease with which Haifa worked the hissing and groaning espresso machine, with the way the stray hairs bounced around the pencil’s well-worn eraser, with the indents of her underthings in her soft flesh.

“Yes, excuse me, sir,” Adnan said.

Ward felt a tap at his elbow. It was Richard. He pointed towards Adnan.

“That will be two fifty.”

“Oh sure, of course.”

By the time Ward had paid, Haifa had his order up and he no longer had an excuse to stand at the counter and watch her work.

Ward’s Amerciano was in a disposable cup with a paper sleeve. He’d forgotten to tell Adnan that he was going to be drinking his coffee here. Ward felt hurt. The disposable cup seemed to be suggesting that he leave. Looking at all the free seats, looking at the table he sat at yesterday, Ward considered turning around and asking for a ceramic cup or just walking out the door and into the morning cold.

He sat down, pulled out his notebook and his pen and set them beside his coffee on the table.

Ward grabbed his phone. He checked the weather, then, force of habit, went to Instagram. He had some small data allowance here, had paid his service provider for it, but was wary of overusing so he looked up at the counter. Adnan had disappeared and Haifa was standing, holding a large remote control up towards the TV, trying to find the angle that would make its signal effective.

“Excuse me,” Ward said a little louder than he would have liked.

Haifa stuck the tip of her tongue out between her teeth as she aimed the remote again.

Ward stood up and took a few steps towards her, holding his phone out. “Excuse me. Haifa?”

She turned, surprised to hear her name.

“I heard that other customer, Richard, and your, well, the man who works here, they both called you Haifa.”

She nearly laughed and it wasn’t mocking, it was kind and open and shining. Toothpaste commercial sparking.

Ward shook his head to remind himself that he had a purpose. “Do you,” he held up his phone, “do you have wi-fi I could use? Wi-fi for customers?”

“KM Café Guest.”

“What’s that?”

“Our wi-fi is called ‘KM Café Guest.’”

“Oh. Right. Thanks. Thank you.”

Ward sat back down and started scrolling through Instagram, his mind empting to make room for pictures of the books his friends were reading, dog and cat pictures, articles by his friends, articles about his friends, the places his friends were if it was away from home, selfies. He paused at a picture of a young woman he used to work with holding a clear, empty liquor bottle against her bare breasts. When Adnan called Haifa, Ward scrolled past the breast picture, wondered how long he’d stared at it. A few pictures down his feed was an image of his wife, his ex, sunglasses he’d never seen sitting on a sun brightened white tablecloth, her hands crossed and a very particular smile on her face that he recognized, but hadn’t seen in years.

It had been her idea that they each take a trip. She’d been the first to go. Ten days to Greece. Ward’s ex-mother-in-law had taken the kids for a night at the beginning of the trip and a night at the end, but the seven days he’d single-parented, planned and executed meals, made sure Alex and Liz were clean and dressed and at school on time or in bed or wherever they needed to be had made him realize that whatever it was that had chased Laura from their marriage had to be substantial enough, deep enough, propped up by enough conviction that she chose to live like this, the exclusive caregiver for two powerfully needy humans, all week each week except for a few hours on Wednesday nights and every other weekend.

Laura had told him where she was going, but not that she was going with anyone and he hadn’t asked. Who was taking the picture? Ward knew Laura’s girlfriends and unless something had changed drastically between her and one of them, this was not a smile for a girlfriend, Laura’s eyes too narrow, too encroached on by facially manifested joy, joy, joy. Good God.

Ward dropped his phone like it was hot. Not Snoop Dogg and Pharrell “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” though. More like X-files. Like some alien spirit had zapped into and nearly melted his cellular device, some alien spirit that could create a present in which Ward doesn’t exist or maybe never existed. He felt sick.

He felt like Laura was getting laid and he wasn’t.

Despite his shaking hands, Ward sipped his coffee. He was walking down that hotel hallway of possible futures and one of the doors had opened a crack. It wasn’t the door that led to the kiss-and-make-up future Ward realized he was holding out for. He focused on his breath, his eyes closed. Deep inhale. No, deeper. Ward’s ribs seemed to be hugging him, but he just wanted air, as much air as he could get.

Fuck it, fuck it. Meditating wasn’t supposed to make you feel claustrophobic, suffocating.

Coffee was the answer. He took another sip. Maybe he should stop. Could his heart handle it? He let some breath out and that made a difference. Had he been holding his breath? No. No way. Impossible.

He opened his notebook to a blank page. Picked up the pen. Took the cap off, put the cap back on.

Write, but write what?

Maybe his coffee could tell him. Ward took another sip and when he set the cup down the paper sleeve slipped. A red organic shape cut with wrinkles caught his eye. He lifted the cup out of the sleeve and saw the lip print in its entirety. Behind the counter, Haifa was checking something on her phone. Maybe sensing Ward’s gaze, she turned towards him. Haifa raised her eyebrows, opened her eyes wide. She was wearing lipstick. It was red. Was it the same colour as what was on his cup?

No.

Maybe.

Could there be another explanation?

So, Ward would find out when Haifa finished work today. If she had no plans maybe she would show him her favourite neighbourhood places? They would grab a lunch or a late lunch or a dinner of tacos or sushi or burgers or Indian food or falafel. Maybe she had a cousin or something who had a falafel place. But falafels at her cousin’s shop would be later, a few days from now, after they had kissed on the sloping grass of some hillside park overlooking a playground and the Bay, after they had made love in his hotel room. Today she wouldn’t be sure about her father and sister knowing, would want it to be a secret, would want to keep Ward for herself.

But how would he go up and talk to her? What would he say?

Take the cup up. Hold it out. Smile. She was alone now. If he waited, Adnan might be there and she might be embarrassed.

How old was she? What were the laws here?

Ward picked up his phone and unlocked it. Instagram was still open on the picture of his wife, but this cup with this lipstick print, with Haifa’s lipstick print, had shielded him from the full force of Laura’s photo. He hit the home icon and Instagram raced to the top of his feed where he saw someone’s photograph of raindrops on a flower.

What would he search for? Legal age California.

He looked at Haifa. She raised her jade eyes to the TV screen then back to her phone without looking at him.

She was in her early twenties, Ward figured. Home from a year at University. College, people called it in the U.S. Or Caw-lidge. Would she tell him about her studies? Medicine or Women’s Studies. Semiotics. Literature. Law. International Development. Would they have better things to talk about?

Would they laugh? Of course. But about what? Ward’s try-hard red Converse. Ward’s long walk yesterday. Ward’s kids? Would that scare her?

He closed his notebook and drained the last sips of coffee.

He looked at the cup for a few beats, then back up at Haifa. She still wasn’t looking at him.

Ward stood up, threw his notebook and pen and novel back into his World Famous bag and lifted the cup to his lips like there was still coffee in it, just for the extra seconds it bought him. Why was he standing? Maybe just to be a tall presence in the space that Haifa couldn’t ignore? Could ignore. Was ignoring.

The screaming synth chimes announced Haifa’s next customer, a man, a young man in a trench coat with pronounced facial bones, skin that looked parchment-thin and thick lips. He reminded Ward of the son from one of those New Yorker back cover watch ads that sells the timepiece as a legacy for future generations. Haifa stared at her phone for a beat, then up at the news program. Adnan worried out of the back of the store and greeted the young model man.

Ward sat back down, clutching his empty cup with the kiss print. He took another empty sip.

The model man ordered a latte, which Ward figured made some sort of sense. While Adnan took model man’s money, Haifa went to the espresso machine and started it whirring and hissing and groaning. To be friendly, Adnan made some comment about the weather and the model man looked at the floor, said, “Yep,” and pulled the trench coat back so he could jam his fingertips up to the big knuckles into the pockets of his black skinny jeans. Haifa glanced at the model man, her cheeks and mouth barely containing her laugh, as if model man’s rudeness was just the cleverist.

Adnan thanked model man then disappeared into the back again.

“How are you today?” model man asked Haifa.

She said she was fine, thank you, and asked how he was.

“I’m very fine.”

Haifa set his latte on the counter without a sleeve, lipstick mark facing out.

“Well,” model man said, tilting his head to make a show of noticing the lipstick mark. “Thank you,” he said.

Ward looked at his own cup. The print was different, but only slightly.

“It’s on all the cups,” Haifa said, picking up her phone.

“Oh,” the model man said.

“Welcome to the Kiss Me Café.”

“That’s—” model man laughed. “I like that.”

“You don’t spend hours a week kissing cups.”

“Do you?” model man asked. “Do you do that?”

“Me and my sister.”

Ward sat for a minute more, feeling the gentle weight of his books against his side, feeling his back and buttocks pressing into the seat. Tired. He was tired. For years he had imagined opportunities with women other than Laura, but it had been more than fifteen years since they had been opportunities he could act on, and this fact was how he explained to himself the feeling of relief that soaked his organs and muscles and bones, relief that Haifa, the lovely, too-young stranger who made his Americano, had not made an advance.

Ward knew that if he could stand up, walk out of here, get back to his hotel and wander down that generic hallway without imposing any figurative meaning on it that he would be able to crawl back into bed and despite the coffee get back to sleep, even if only for an hour or two. 

Toronto, June 2016

Emoji Sequence: Fiona Laviolette

Story: Lee Sheppard

Your Place In The World

It’s the morning of your birthday, the first birthday you’ve ever spent without your mother—not because she’s dead, she’s too proud for that—but because the week of your birthday happened to be the only week your partner’s family, dispersed now across Canada, could meet up at the family home on Vancouver Island. You have made it down the wide, creaking staircase without waking any child, you have crossed the hallway, littered with shoes and sleeping dogs, without stumbling or stepping on anything that barks, you have entered the kitchen and closed the door and are walking towards the kettle and the French press when a pain in your foot collapses your leg and you curse, which wakes Brandy, your brother-in-law David’s deeply compassionate golden retriever-German shepherd mix, who scrambles up, her nails scraping the hallway floor, which wakes Harold, your sister-in-law Stephanie’s boneheaded boxer who barks and whips his head around desperately to try and figure out why, why, why he is barking. “Oh, shut up,” you say, your voice an eerie emulation of your father, though you make this observation so quickly that it slips through the net of your memory of the event and swims back into the sea of your subconscious.

A toy unicorn. Someone’s fucking toy unicorn.

And now someone is crying. Harold has stopped barking but he and Brandy seem desperate to go upstairs to help.

In the moment it takes you to figure out if it is your youngest daughter or your youngest niece crying, you toss the unicorn towards the living room then see your brother-in-law Stan asleep under a nylon sleeping bag and glistening with sweat. The unicorn hits him near his feet. It slips sibilantly off the sleeping bag, bounces from the couch and thumps against the floor. Stan rolls over mumbling something about stupid dogs and covers his head with a throw pillow that you can’t tell for sure in the dark but you think may have a Popsicle stick stuck to its coarse fabric.

It is your daughter. The crying is your daughter.

So you tell the dogs to “stay” and charge upstairs as fast as your tiptoes can carry you up the creaking stairs. When you see your youngest daughter, Erica, standing against the netting of the Pack ’n Play, you know that all hope of a quiet, private morning has vanished. Still, you are whispering that you are there, that it is okay, that she should, shhh, just go back to sleep. Erica is quiet when your partner comes in bleary eyed and sees you standing there. “Oh, okay,” your partner says and Erica gets excited and reaches for her mother. “Hi,” your partner says.

Your oldest daughter whimpers then and you wave your partner away in a way that you know she finds rude.

She scowls.

You pick Erica up and shake your head at a pace that says, I can’t fucking believe it, it’s five-thirty and I got up to avoid all this shit.

Your partner says, “I can get up,” and you flick your head quickly, No. “Why don’t you go back to bed?” she suggests.

You press your finger to your lip, telling her to shhh.

“Stop it,” she says, like you’re one of the dogs.

You hold your hand out, palm down, your way of silently saying, Relax.

You are driving your partner crazy. “Okay, I got it. You don’t want to be here.”

Good morning.

“Happy birthday,” she says as she turns and heads back to bed.

You manage to get out of the bedroom and down the stairs again. Erica says, “Dogs,” as you cross through the hall. Brandy raises her head. “Don’t even think about it,” you say and feel badly.

You start the kettle and hand Erica a piece of banana which she seems more interested in mashing against things or seeing how much dirt she can cause to adhere to than eating. Then, as you are measuring out the coffee, she throws the banana and starts shouting for yogurt.

Stan over on the couch mutters something. Erica gets scared and she starts crying. You take her out onto the porch, and the sound of that, probably specifically the sound of the suction on the outer door, the sticky snapping open and the woosh of air that makes any closed door rattle against its latch—or maybe whatever enticing smells flood the house—gets the dogs shuffling around, agitated, and vocalizing. You can’t be bothered.

It is cool outside and your hands go immediately cold. Your ears, too. Erica isn’t satisfied playing with the Rubbermaid bin of toys on the porch and wants to walk on the lawn with its human-scale dog feces, which is so much harder to see in the dim early morning light. You do that for a few minutes, startling the sleepy, slow flies from their shit-beds, or their shit-meals or whatever shit thing they are doing and sending them buzzing lazily in the air before you spot your stroller hanging from a large coat hook on the outside of the house where you hung it so whichever of the neighbourhood cats wouldn’t piss on it again. You grab Erica from under her arms and she laughs like she thinks you are playing. “Let’s go for a walk,” you say.

You go inside to grab a sweater for you and a sweater for her and you pause by the kitchen counter to consider making that coffee, but as soon as you do, Erica starts to strain towards the door, her arm reaching and saying, “Walk, want walk.”

You go into the room you and your partner are staying in and set Erica down in the nook created by your partner’s fetal positioning. Your partner say, “Hunh?” and you whisper, “Watch her for a sec., I’m just gonna grab us sweaters.” Your partner says, “Sweaters?” like you are crazy, possibly dangerously, and you say, “Yes. Sweaters.” She asks you what your problem is. You don’t answer.

You are ninja-quiet going into the room where Erica’s older sister, Virginia, is mercifully, probably delicately, still asleep. Out the open window a motorcycle screams by—it sounds like it's racing along the sill—but Virginia doesn’t even sigh. Then, suddenly, you are worried that she’s dead and you watch her chest for a minute to make sure that it is still rising and falling rhythmically. It is. You leave.

You walk into town. Erica is singing. The birds, too. The coffee shop that you love, a bastion of familiar coffee options and near-familiar feeling, is closed at this hour, which shouldn’t surprise you, you know. Shouldn’t upset you. Tim Hortons is open and you go there and order the dark roast coffee you scoffed at the ads for. You buy Erica a donut. The feeling in Tim’s is familiar too, from your youth, and if the tables and colour schemes have changed in the last thirty-years they have been changed with a delicacy and care that intends to escape your notice.

What is different is the clientele here on the Island, in Duncan, at six on a Saturday morning. The erasure and assimilation project so central to Canadian colonialism isn’t as far along here, will hopefully never get so far here as it has in the Greater Toronto Area. There are, you take pains to acknowledge, a woman your age with a stethoscope around her neck, its black rubber wrapped in beautiful, colourful beadwork and an older Native couple at a table by the front window having a quiet breakfast and conversation, the man’s hair carefully combed—slicked—and the woman smiling warmly at Erica when they spot each other. But there is also a woman who seems to be at the tail end of a substance-hammered night clutching at her extra-large coffee like it’s the only buoyant thing in her sea of suffering. There is a man with large, vicious looking scabs coming out of the bathroom who makes eye contact with you and offers a grin with gaps, maybe fresh. You nod, possibly imperceptibly, and say, “Hi,” with too little breath.

A maybe twelve-year old boy with black hair and a No Fear shirt opens the door to enter, spots you trying to leave and tells his siblings to, “Wait, guys,” and you thank him as you navigate Erica’s stroller out the door trying desperately not to spill your coffee. For whatever reasons, you apologize to the people you presume are the boy’s parents as you scuttle past them on the sidewalk.

 You cross the highway and walk towards the river. Any time you slow down or start pushing the stroller with one hand and it arcs as a result, Erica says, “Go, go, go,” and jerks her body forward and back, her head slamming the back rest. This means that you drink much less of your coffee than you would like.

Before the bridge, you push the stroller off the sidewalk and down a path of flattened grass that allows you to avoid the stairs leading to the gravel walkway running parallel to the Cowichan River. The gravel is much harder on the stroller’s wheels and you are actually stopped a few times before you curse and give up.

Erica is saying, “Out, out, out,” and you are telling her to just hold on. It is hard to find a spot on the ground where you feel confident that you can set your coffee down and it won’t tip over. You decide to put it on the edge of the path a few feet away. Erica is rocking forward and back again as you approach to unbuckle her. As soon as you set her feet on the ground, she races down the slight incline to the tall plants that create a barrier between the path and the river. You tell her to hold on as you grab your coffee and with one hand swing the stroller onto the grass. You have to tell yourself to relax, and you do tell yourself. The river’s long monologue is audible in between the sound of trucks passing over the bridge on the highway. Erica is happily running with her hand out, sweeping the long grasses. The coffee is starting to work. The wind is playing ventriloquist with the leaves on the trees and the sun is drawing elongated images of houses and trees east of the path. You can feel the day cooling off your heart.

But Erica has disappeared.

You look back along the path towards the highway. You squint. You call, “Erica?”

She squeals from somewhere beyond the wall of plants.

Your coffee rocking and splashing out from the hole you tore in the lid and landing burning on your hand, barely registers against the hot humming panic animating your body, yet some corner of your mind manages to tell your left hand to grab the cup so your right hand can grasp it from the top, your fingers free of the splashing, burning beverage.

“Erica?” you call again.

She laughs again and bursts out of the grasses running on stiff legs and waving a pair of jean shorts in the air. You laugh relief, then surprise because where’d she get a pair of jean shorts. Now the pain of the coffee on your hand forces a, “Fuck!” and you again grab the cup with your left hand, this time more consciously, and flick your right hand as if that’s a way to get rid of the pain. Erica drops the jean shorts and runs back towards what you see is a concave dirt rut cut by use through the tall plants. “Where are you going?” you say and her hands and eyebrows leap up and she screams like you are playing a game with her now. “Erica!” you shout. She shudders with surprise, falls onto her diaper-padded bum and begins to cry. Certain now that she won’t go any where, you walk over to inspect the jean shorts.

They are cut to the edge of the back pocket, short enough that the thin, light blue front pockets would hang below their frayed hem. Through one leg hole you can see a pink, frilly fringe and a pattern of tiny black and yellow bees.

You put your burnt, throbbing right hand into your pocket, pull out your phone and take a picture.

Squatting, you pick Erica up with one arm and she rests her snotty, tear-streaked face against your shoulder. You walk her down the path. A few steps towards the Cowichan and the riverside plants already reach past your head. You see a depression that looks like a deer bed. “Is this where you found those shorts,” you ask Erica. She lifts her head and looks, but says nothing. “Is this where you grabbed those jeans?”

“Jeans,” Erica says. She buries her wet, warm face in your neck and laughs.

Curiosity walks you to the riverbank, raised and clear here. There is a path down to a rocky, shallow pool. Though called a river, the Cowichan is closer in size to the creeks you know from southern Ontario and there is something about it that makes you feel like you are home, reminds you of bike rides with your mother, Sunday drives with your grandparents, exploring with your father.

Near the water’s edge you notice a twelve pack of Labatt Ice—the box anyway—a clutter of brown empties visible through the torn top. Beside the box is a bottle on its side half in the water, rocking slightly.

As you walk back to the stroller sipping coffee, your brain writes stories. It is the need to account for the women’s underwear still in the jean shorts that seems to push each ending to an unhappy place—drunk, bottomless swim leads to drowning; sex in the grass followed with a hasty bottomless departure. You buckle Erica in and wonder if you missed a body bobbing around some bend in the river, or a used condom hanging off some tall riverside plant like the limp pupa of a monstrous butterfly.

The sound of a car door slamming means nothing to you until you see a beautiful girl, obviously tired, obviously upset, walk to the edge of the wall of plants then along it, head turned towards the hidden, monologuing Cowichan. She is wearing a long, white shirt with some sparkling design. She stops and takes a few steps down a path like the one you so recently emerged from, but before she disappears you notice that the back of her shirt has some sort of plant matter clinging to it. When she returns from down the path, you notice her breasts rocking rhythmlessly as she trots along the edge of the plant wall. You turn your head forward, conscious of staring, and you see an older woman—possibly her mother—watching the girl. There is a cluster of keys and tchotchke key chains bouncing from the middle finger of the older woman’s impatient left hand. “Found them,” you hear the girl shout, her voice tired, but relieved.

“Okay,” the older woman shouts, too loud for how close you and Erica are. She smiles nearly apologetically.

You nod.

“Let’s go,” the older woman shouts.

The girl shouts back, “I’m coming.”

A hundred meters down the street, they speed past you in an old Ford Focus.

Back at your in-laws’ place, your partner and Virginia are up and they both wish you a happy birthday. David is sitting in a low lawn-chair, Brandy lying at his feet. David wishes you a happy birthday, too, then sips his coffee.

Your partner asks how you are.

You smile too wide and hold up your right hand, your thumb and index finger forming a circle. “Perfect,” you say.

Your partner suggests that maybe you go off on your own today, like go for a walk or go sit in a coffee shop and read or something. You want to tell her about the girl and the beer and the jean shorts and the underwear, but don’t know what you would say.

Virginia runs up to you and smash-hugs your thighs. “Daddy?”

“Yes.”

She holds up the unicorn that you stepped on and tossed accidentally at her Uncle Stan. “It moved,” she says. “It’s magic.”

That makes you laugh.

“What?” she asks.

Your partner explains that Virginia remembers leaving it “set up” in the kitchen and that when they woke, it was on the coffee table by where Uncle Stan was sleeping.

Uncle Stan comes outside, trailing two of David’s kids. Virginia gets quickly distracted. Stan wishes you a happy birthday, then sits down and starts telling David about a dirt bike engine he’s trying to re-build.

Erica is chasing some cousins around and squealing.

You ask your partner if she’s good, if you can go have a shower. She says yes.

You say good morning to your mother-in-law who’s making another French press of coffee in the kitchen. She asks you if you want a cup. You tell her yes, when you are out of the shower you would love a cup. She makes a face before saying, “I’ll just make a fresh batch then,” because both of you know that there will be no coffee left five minutes from now.

It takes David’s wife, Lisa, wishing you a happy birthday to remind your mother-in-law of the day’s significance. She apologizes, wishes you a happy birthday then apologizes again.

In the shower, you think about the girl and now that you know she is safe you feel permission to make the story positive. Sexy. You can imagine the riverside plants all around you, under your bare knees. The sound of the water going down the drain is the murmur of the Cowichan, the warm water the warmth of another body pressed willingly, thrillingly against your own.

It is only after the shower, hearing your daughters’ voices through the open window that you imagine yourself the jean short girl’s mother. Despite the guilt that the thought brings, you still resolve that tonight you will suggest to your partner a walk down by the river.

As you are getting dressed, your partner and children come upstairs to the room you are staying in. Virginia and your partner give you cards. Your partner hands Erica a package and the girl nearly gets it to you before she drops it on the ground and starts tearing at the tissue paper. Your partner tries to stop her, but you say it is okay and you get down on the floor and unwrap the gift with Erica’s help. It is a short-sleeved chambray shirt. You put it on. You thank your partner and she hugs you and kisses you.

All morning, your partner’s family compliments you on your new shirt.

After lunch, you call your mother. She wishes you a happy birthday and tells you that since she woke up this morning she has wanted to call you, but she wasn’t sure when she should call because of the time difference and because she knows it can be busy at your in-laws’ place. She asks you how you are doing and you tell her about waking up to be alone and about the dogs and Erica and the unicorn toy that you threw and that now Virginia thinks is actually magic. Your mother tells you she misses you, but that she understands. She tells you how proud she is of you. She tells you how important you are to her and how when you were born she finally understood her place in the world. You know what she means. You have heard it before. You tell her thank you, because you appreciate it. You tell her about Erica disappearing in the grass by the river and the horrible flood of fear. Your mother tells you that once she lost sight of you at the CNE and that it was only a few seconds before she found you and picked you up so quickly and with such loving force that you cried, but for those few seconds she felt— She can’t find a word. You picture the midway at the Ex: all the metal amusements, all their moving parts, all the people. “I can’t imagine,” you say, which is obviously not true, but you don’t bother to correct yourself.

You spend the afternoon with your partner’s family at a provincial park along the river. People are going down some small rapids on one of two yellow, inflatable mattresses. Virginia and you go too and the first time Virginia screams and cries, but when you reach the end of your run she says she wants to go again, so you do, many times. You collect stones at a gentle bend fifty meters up river. Erica naps under a small nylon structure that David and Lisa brought, then, when she wakes up she sits in a shallow pool with her grandmother and your partner. Your partner looks good in her bathing suit and you notice, but you have to think about other things. Three times you get up to go pee in the woods, each time walking further down a small path and scanning the bushes for deer beds and discarded clothes. As you are leaving the park, Virginia has a tantrum about a hardboiled egg that she has thrown in the sand and still wants to eat. There are no more hardboiled eggs. She says she hates you and you hug her and she tells you to let her go, that you are hurting her. In the car on the way back to your in-laws’ house, your partner tells Virginia that when she shouts like that you and your partner worry that the Child Services or Children’s Aid will come and take her away. You watch the sunlight flickering between the cedar trees.

After your girls have gone to bed, after dinner, your partner’s family surprises you with a cake. You thank them. Some people give you cards, the card from your mother- and father-in-law has a cheque for one hundred dollars. You thank them. Your father-in-law makes coffee and offers a cup to anyone who is interested. You consider it, briefly. Everyone eats their cake and you eat your cake, but you are waiting for an opportunity to ask your partner to go on a walk with you, but your partner, who misses her family for the eleven and a half months that you spend halfway across this massive country from them, is engaged in a conversation with her sister and you just don’t have the patience to wait. You stand up and announce that you are going for a walk.

“Do you want me to come with you?” your partner asks.

“It’s up to you,” you say.

“Maybe you’d like some time to yourself,” she says.

“Sure,” you say.

“I’ll come,” she says. The kitchen is quiet and her whole family is listening, because they can’t help it.

“No,” you say. “It’s okay.”

You stand for a second at the curb out front of your in-laws’ house. You are lonely and angry. Plus, your mind is constructing violent, fearful, racist narratives now. Some tricked out Honda Civic with a muffler modification rips past and your exhausted body shudders.

You go back up the walk to the house, stop at the threshold and, looking down at your shoes like you need to look down at them as you take them off, you say, “You know what? Fuck the walk. I’m beat.”

“You’re going to bed?” your partner asks.

“Yeah,” you say.

Everyone wishes you a good night, then Lisa remembers to wish you a final happy birthday and everyone follows suit.

“See you in the morning,” you say.

You ascend the creaking stairs and prepare yourself to sleep. 

Toronto, June 2016

Emoji sequence: Kat Armstrong

Story: Lee Sheppard

Shining

They’d met in primary school. Lisa liked Jens’s smile and his blond and twisted hair looked to her like the fur between her yellow Labrador retriever Tina’s shoulders. Jens thought Lisa’s skin was like bread crust or one of those new things Mom was buying from Tim Horton’s—cross aunts he called them. Or cwah-sawnts. Under the slide once, Jens put Lisa’s forearm into his mouth to see if it tasted baked. He couldn’t remember the flavour, but years later he would recall the sound of her laugh when she pulled her arm away and the way that her brown eyes nearly disappeared when she smiled.

That year—kindergarten—Jens’s family went to visit relatives in Sweden and he was gone for the week before and after March Break. One night while Jens was away, Lisa broke into tears on the bathmat and her father, Mahir, held her while she said Jens’s name over and over. Tina came to lick away her tears and Mahir kept asking, What’s that? and, What are you saying? It wasn’t until Lisa said, “He’s so cute, He’s just so cute,” that Mahir realized that Jens was a name and that Lisa had a crush. Mahir figured out that Jens was on holiday and that his absence was the reason for Lisa’s distress—she worried Jens was gone forever. Mahir asked if Jens was in her class picture and Lisa wailed, “Noooooo.” Mahir said, “I bet he is, Lisa,” and they went to check. He was standing in the back row wearing big, crooked glasses and a Minnesota North Stars jersey.

There were a few years of girls and boys being icky to each other and love being embarrassing, completely out of the question, a curse like cooties or unutterable like the word shit, though with a totally different magic.

In grade four, Lisa started “going out” with Jack Edwards, a grade six who, the grade four girls agreed, looked like Jonathan Knight from New Kids on The Block. At recesses, Jens played a game they called kickball—a sort of hockey played with a tennis ball and without sticks. Jack played kickball, too and Jens, who was the biggest kid in their grade four class, thought that Jack, who was the third tallest of the grade sixes, was too rough when they played. Jack played with his head down and his arms out to protect himself, so it was not uncommon for the other players to take one of Jack’s elbows or fingers to the face. In fact, more than once while Jens fought for the ball against the school wall, Jack hit him. It was disorienting to Jens at first, but playing against Jack taught Jens to be more aware of who was around him. When Lisa started going out with Jack, it turned Jack into an object of intense hate for Jens. When he looked at Jack, Jens saw a drumstick or a steak like in the cartoons, or he imagined he did anyway. Not that Jens hated drumsticks or steaks, but he understood that some form of madness or hunger had blinded him and transformed Jack into something that he, Jens, wanted to devour. When Jack accidentally knocked off Jens’s glasses, Jens stepped on the tennis ball, grabbed Jack’s forearm and took Jack’s thumb in his mouth. He bit down on it and held it there. It tasted like fruit rollup and roast beef sandwiches. Jack hit the back of Jens’s head with his open hand and shouted, “Ow, shit, ouch, oh my God,” and cried, his face disfigured by fear, pain and shock.

Lisa stopped skipping rope with her friends to watch. It took Mr. Warden, Jens’s favourite teacher, to talk Jens into opening his mouth. Mr. Warden had been eating lunch in the staffroom, when Doris Anderson, the parent volunteer helping supervise lunch, knocked and said, “Mr. Warden, we have a problem with Jens.” Mr. Warden liked Jens too and he sat with the boy in the main office until the principal could see Jens. Jens was suspended for a day and instructed not to play kick ball.

The other kids who played, though, they knew what a menace Jack was and when their attempts to discourage Jack—picking him last, never passing him the ball, even elbowing him in the ribs—all failed, the kickball games stopped. Jack and Lisa started spending lunches under a white pine tree near the back corner of the playground and Jens spent recesses walking around forlornly until someone told him that Erica Dubois, who was maybe the second prettiest girl in their class, thought he was cute. When Jens and Erica started dating, they made the maple tree near the kindergarten class their territory. Then, maybe a week after Jens and Erica became boyfriend and girlfriend, someone brought a bat and a ball and someone else brought a glove and they were pitching and hitting on the little baseball diamond and the next day a bunch of the guys who played kickball also brought their gloves and bats and balls. In a few days Jack, then Jens joined in too.

Through the summer, Jack called Lisa, but when grade seven started and Jack was at a new school, he told Lisa that he still really liked her like a friend and even more than that, but that he had to move on. It didn’t occur to Lisa to wonder where Jack had heard a phrase like “have to move on.” She cried a little bit, but she’d also started to find Jack’s phone calls annoying. Especially trying to say goodbye to him—he’d always say, “But I don’t want to get off the phone,” or “I don’t want you to get off the phone,” and sigh and keep Lisa on the phone for a while longer.

By the time school started again, Jens had forgotten that he and Erica had been going out. One of Erica’s friends—Heather Stevens—came up to Jens and said, “Erica wants to know if she’s still your girlfriend.”

Jens tried to think of the right thing to say, but couldn’t. “I don’t think so.”

Jens was walking with his friend, Norman, when Heather and Erica and a few of the other girls in grade five surrounded Jens. Erica stood in front of him. The other girls held Jens in place. He waited for Erica to say something. Heather said, “Do it. We can’t hold him here forever.” Jens wasn’t fighting them at all, it was just Heather getting bored. Then Erica stepped up to Jens, put her arm around the back of his neck and pulled his head down towards her or tried to lift herself up to him, maybe. She closed her eyes and Jens knew she was going to kiss him. He wasn’t expecting her tongue, wet and hard, to press past his lips and part his teeth. It broke into his mouth with such force and determination that while it didn’t reach his uvula the anticipation that it would forced him to gag. His head jerked forward and his chin collided with Erica’s. His eyes watered in panic. Erica said, “Mmm,” like she was tasting something delicious.

Jens went and sat with Norman under the white pine. Norman was excited about what had happened and even a little jealous. Heather came back and asked Jens if he wanted to go out with Erica. “No!” Jens shouted and started crying. Heather stood there with her mouth open for a while before turning and leaving. Norman asked if Jens was okay, then left, too.

Lisa walked over to the tree. Jens stood up, walked over to the fence that separated the schoolyard from the fallow, rolling field behind it and took off his glasses. He rubbed his eyes. Lisa lifted herself up onto one of the pine’s branches. It was sticky with clear, hard sap that stuck to the star-print fabric of her sundress. Jens noticed that the fence post he was leaning on was loose. He started to wiggle it back and forth like a giant wooden tooth. It fell over and Jens fell forward with it. The panic he felt was surprise, but also fear that he had violated something—the fence, the field, the rules. He crawled backwards onto the school property, his knees and hands finding the ground through the rectangular holes of the broad metal mesh. Lisa was there, suddenly off her tree branch. She didn’t ask Jens if he was all right, she just helped him lift the heavy wooden post and balance it where it had always stood for all they knew. The bell rang and they walked back to class together.

Starting in grade seven, Jens and Lisa attended different schools. Jens lived farther south and was bussed to a middle school in an affluent town by the lake. Lisa lived farther north so she was bussed, like the majority of the former students of their primary school, to a middle school in the farming town that occupied a large square at the center of a quilt of pastures and cornfields. Jens pined over Paola, a grade eight with tight blonde curls, three different Pink Floyd shirts and sunglasses in the shape of hearts. Lisa started dating Alex, a grade eight who wore hockey jerseys and joked too often and not well, so had developed the tic of sticking out his tongue so people knew when to laugh.

Jens was eating his lunch one day when three girls from his class—Jodie, Claire and Alice—sat down with him. Claire sat beside him, Jodie and Alice across from him. Alice said, “Will you flex for us?”

“What?” Jens said.

“Your arm,” Jodie said. “Will you flex your arm?”

He was confused, but he held up his right arm and flexed his bicep.

Claire reached across and touched it.

“Yep,” Alice said.

“I told you,” Jodie said.

Claire giggled.

“What?” Jens asked again.

“Do you work out?” Alice asked.

“Work out?” Jens asked.

“Like, with weights,” Jodie said.

Jens shook his head. Were they making fun of him.

“Claire thinks you’re cute,” Alice said.

“Alice!” Claire said.

“Will you go out with her,” Jodie asked.

Jens had forgotten being swarmed by Erica and Heather and her friends. He felt deja vu claustrophobia.

“Look how cute she is,” Jodie said.

Jens turned to Claire. She looked down at her hands, which she had folded awkwardly in her lap. Then she looked up at Jens and something there, the vulnerability maybe, set some warm feeling spilling through his guts. He was about to speak when something blunt collided with his eye and his glasses were suddenly gone. A white light burst in the corner of his right eye where he’d been struck. He closed his eyes.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Alice said.

“Alice!” Claire said.

Jens opened his eyes and Alice was holding his glasses in front of her. “I just wanted him to get a good look at you,” Alice said. “I’m so sorry,” she told Jens again.

Three weeks later, when Jens and Claire French kissed in the small nook outside the staffroom entrance, she rhythmically scraped his lips with her braces like she was chewing and he drooled down her chin. They waited three days before trying again, in a walkway between nearby houses, and it wasn’t anywhere near as painful or as embarrassing. Still, just a day after that second French kiss, Alice and Jodie came up to Jens while on the other side of the school yard, Jens could see Claire was talking to Derek, a grade eight guy with stubble and a dresser full of Los Angeles Raiders clothes. The phrase “more as just a friend,” was used. Jens understood and was actually kind of relieved. 

Lisa and Alex had been dating for a nine months by the time Lisa’s mother, Deborah, asked Lisa to invite Alex over to their home. Alex’s mother and father drove him from their modest farmhouse, down their gravel driveway, left down a straight road, then right onto 7^th Line towards the ravine cut by the creek. Lisa, Deborah and Mahir lived in a house with big windows and graying cedar siding designed twenty years ago by the head architect at Mahir’s firm. Dappled by sunlight, the house nearly disappeared into the woods that surrounded it, a whole different type of modest than Alex’s family’s farmhouse. Martin, Alex’s father, said, “That’s a house, eh?” then coughed as if he could move the lump of phlegm that lived in his lungs.

“That roof’s upside down,” Alex said.

Martin laughed then coughed again.

Alex’s mother, Penny, nervous to meet Deborah and her husband told Martin and Alex to cut it out.

But Alex was right, actually. The architect chose to have the roof in the shape of a V to invert the traditional form and to create two separate upstairs spaces. The problem was that in such a well-wooded area, Mahir and Deborah were forced, annually, to clear nearly fifty garbage bags of debris from the gutter in the center of the roof.

Alex rang the doorbell. When Lisa opened the door, her parents were right behind her. Mahir had seen looks like the ones Penny, Martin and even Alex gave him, but they seemed to reach deeper into him than normal because he knew immediately what it meant for Lisa. Maybe Deborah saw the looks, too, but she still invited Penny and Martin in for tea. She’d made granola squares and when Martin refused, then coughed, Deborah offered to get a package of cookies. They even refused those. Lisa asked Alex if he wanted to walk down by the creek, but he shook his head. For an hour the families sat facing each other. Martin, Penny and Alex couldn’t get comfortable and in the car on the way home they would blame the furniture for it, though they did talk about Lisa being brown and why didn’t Alex tell them and Alex would swear he hadn’t known while in his mind he was wrestling with the fact that meeting Mahir had knocked Lisa out of the position he’d held her in. He knew it was wrong, but he knew it was true.

In grade eight, Lisa didn’t date anyone. It was a choice, but she wasn’t sure that the choice was entirely hers. For a week Jens dated a cheerleader in grade seven, but mostly he longed for an opportunity to date Christine or Nadege or Laura, three girls in the French emersion program, all lovely, all aloof.

Mahir and Deborah, with Lisa’s consent, enrolled Lisa at the high school in the affluent town south of them. They hoped that the larger, more diverse community it served would be less of a struggle for their daughter to fit in to.

Grade nine was a tough adjustment, but people started dating very quickly, as if needing to share the burden of going to a new school. Jens was already dating JoAnne when, on his way to Science, he saw Lisa getting a binder out of her locker. Something shifted in Jens’s body. It was a startling sensation, but it wasn’t unpleasant. “Hi, Lisa,” he said.

She smiled when she saw him. It was the first real smile—the first smile that she couldn’t deny—that she’d shared at her new school. Lisa had been struggling to make friends. She was honest about it with Jens, when he asked how she was doing.

The bell rang.

“Are you around at all before school?” Jens asked, as he started walking to class.

“My dad drops me off a little before first. So, yeah.”

“Come to the cafeteria. I’m always in the cafeteria with my girlfriend.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

Jens nodded. “JoAnne.” Jens smiled a little sadly, Lisa thought. “See you later.”

Lisa and JoAnne became friends and stayed friends even after JoAnne and Jens broke up. 

The school hosted a coffee house in December. JoAnne and her older brother played a set of five songs. They covered Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Led Zepplin, and Heart. Their fifth song was an original written by JoAnne and Lisa. Jens started to play guitar. Lisa bought a bass.

Jens’s first band did covers, too. His favourite was Pearl Jam’s “State of Love and Trust.” Jens’s band played the spring coffee house, but broke up shortly after because the singer wanted them to do too many U2 covers.

JoAnne and Lisa started playing with Nancy, a girl in grade eleven who was in JoAnne’s brother’s music class. They recorded a demo of six original songs. They were denied a spot in the coffee house line-up. The official reason was that they did no covers. But in the summer, they played a festival at a park by the waterfront. Jens was there and he thought they were amazing. He bought a copy of the demo and listened to it over and over again. He only stopped when, while trying to sleep off a raging fever, he dreamed of Nancy, JoAnne and Lisa dousing him with buckets of water.

In grade ten Jens started playing rhythm guitar in a punk band with three guys in grade eleven, twelve and thirteen. They played all original songs. They played coffee houses at their school, but were also invited to play at other schools. Their most popular song was about kidnapping a porno star. They broke up shortly after they recorded and dubbed 100 copies of their demo.

JoAnne, Lisa and Nancy kept playing together, though they rarely played shows. Being denied inclusion so frequently was exhausting, so, more often than not, they didn’t even bother asking.

The last show Jens’s band played was in the basement of the Masonic Lodge in town. Two hardcore bands played, one from the city, one from a community like Jens’s on the other side of the city. Jens bought everything of theirs he could—a demo cassette from the city band, a seven-inch record and a patch from the band from the other side of the city. He had to go to a friend’s house to listen to the seven-inch. He copied it onto cassette.

Jens started going to hardcore shows and buying records from Adam, a French Canadian guy who would display the albums in shoeboxes. Jens would read the little reviews Adam wrote on recipe cards and scotch-taped to the front copy of each record. For his birthday, Jens’s mom took him to a stereo shop and bought him a record player so he could finally listen to all his seven-inches and LPs.

Lisa was getting frustrated with her band. They had twelve new songs, seven of them written by her, and she thought they were ready to demo them. But Nancy didn’t trust Jacob, the guy that they recorded their first demo with, that everybody they knew recorded with. Nancy and her mom were looking for an affordable studio that also had experience working with women. They weren’t writing anything new, because they felt like twelve was maybe even too many songs for a record. And they still weren’t playing many shows.

One morning neither JoAnne nor Nancy was at their table in the cafeteria and Jens was super-excited to tell Lisa about a split seven-inch he’d bought from Adam at a show on the weekend, so Lisa asked, “You’re still not playing with anybody, right?”

Jens said, “Yeah, that’s true.”

“Why don’t we play together?”

“But you’re in a band.”

“I can be in two.”

“I don’t know. I.” He put his Walkman on the table. “I’m just really into hardcore right now.” He handed her his headphones.

Lisa put the headphones on.

Jens turned the volume down, then pressed play.

Lisa relaxed her expression, then blinked slowly, opened her eyes wide and stared blankly at the photo of Queen Elizabeth above the entrance to the cafeteria.

Jens pressed pause. “Wait,” he said. “What song is it?”

He moved to the other side of the table and spent the twenty minutes before class shuttling the tape around to play this amazing bassline, that amazing scream, this other song he loved.

Lisa liked the music, had to insist to Jens that she liked the music, then wanted to know when they could get together to start working. “We don’t have a drummer or anything,” Jens said.

“We can start writing,” Lisa suggested.

“Uh, okay. I’ll play guitar, I guess. You’ll play bass?”

“Right. I can bring my bass to school. Maybe we can practice at your place? Thursday or something?”

“I don’t have a bass amp.”

“Does your amp have two inputs?”

“I think so. Yeah.”

“For now, I’ll just plug into that.”

Jens nodded.

Lisa asked Jens for a copy of the tape he’d shown her. He brought it the next day. Lisa listened in her room and tried her best to play along.

Jens kept trying to think of a hardcore band he’d seen with a girl. He couldn’t think of any. It made him nervous, like maybe he was making a mistake. He put on his copy of Sonic Youth’s Dirty. He didn’t like the songs Kim Gordon sang as much as he liked the songs Thurston Moore or Lee Ranaldo sang, but they were still pretty good, still pretty punk.

On Thursday, on the walk to Jens’s, Lisa talked about which songs from the cassette she liked and said that she had been playing with a few ideas. Jens said, “I haven’t thought of anything.”

Lisa was excited to play with someone new.

Jens was watching his feet and trying not to stare at Lisa.

“What will we call ourselves?” Lisa asked.

“We gotta find a band first.”

“JoAnne plays drums now, too. She’s pretty good.”

“I like JoAnne.” She is a much better guitar player than me, Jens thought.

“We can ask someone else. I mean, maybe it would be good for me to play with all new people.”

“I don’t really know. We could ask Tim.” Tim was the drummer from Jens’s last band.

“We don’t need to decide now.” Lisa smiled at Jens.

Jens attempted to smile back.

“What’s wrong?” Lisa asked.

“Nothing,” Jens said.

“You seem weird. Is something bugging you?”

“No,” he said.

Lisa asked Jens what were the names of some of the bands that he really liked. Like not necessarily bands he really liked, but names he thought were good. He told her. “Okay,” Lisa said, “so what if we were called, like Frozen Ground? Or Scorched Earth?”

“Those are pretty good,” Jens admitted.

“Or Stasis? Or Aperture?”

“I like those, too.”

“Okay,” Lisa said. “I guess we can think about it.”

“Awesome.”

They played for two hours before dinner. Lisa had not had any trouble, through her investigation of Jens’s cassette, picking up any of the genre’s tropes and she had a lot technically to show Jens, whose approach to his hardcore records had been much more emotional. They both felt like they were just scratching the surface when Jens’s mother called down and asked if his friend was staying for dinner. Lisa called Mahir and explained that they had played already, but that they weren’t finished and that she’d been invited to dinner. Mahir said it was no problem, she could stay and that he’d be happy to pick her up any time before ten.

Jens’s mom, Erica, didn’t remember Lisa from primary school, but was very excited that she and Jens had known each other for so long. Jens’s little sister, Astrid, couldn’t stop looking at Lisa. It embarrassed Jens, who also felt like he couldn’t keep his eyes off his old friend, but after dinner Lisa said she thought Astrid was cute.

They started working on a song. Jens was nervous to shout at first, but when Lisa started singing with him, he lifted his voice louder. They wrote lyrics together in a notebook Jens had intended to use as a journal. Jens was hoarse when he said goodbye to Lisa. He couldn’t sleep. Lisa went home and wrote more.

In a few weeks, they had six songs and had decided to call themselves Focus. They asked JoAnne to play drums. She told Lisa that she was worried how Nancy would feel about it, but said sure anyway. Over their time playing together, Jens and Lisa had developed a language around song structure and Jens was aware of it and felt proud. Listening to Lisa and JoAnne humbled him. They almost didn’t need to speak. To JoAnne, Jens could barely convey even the simplest information about the songs he and Lisa had been working on. For a while, Lisa functioned like a translator between Jens and JoAnne.

Focus played their first show a week before JoAnne got her license. Mahir drove them to the local YMCA. Jens had gotten to know Mahir and he really liked him. JoAnne and Lisa joked that maybe the two of them—Mahir and Jens—should start their own band. Jens said he thought that would be cool, then asked if Mahir played sitar or something. Lisa asked if Jens was serious. Jens said, “What?”

“He grew up here,” Lisa said.

“So,” Jens said.

She shook her head. “He plays piano.”

“What did I say?” Jens asked.

“It’s racist,” JoAnne explained, “assuming he plays sitar.”

“I’m not racist,” Jens said.

The promoter came over to them. “Hey, sorry. Hi. You guys need help with your gear?”

Jens said, No, but JoAnne said, Sure. The promoter carried the drum hardware upstairs.

Focus played well. Jens didn’t remember ever seeing so many girls at a show. They mostly came up to JoAnne and Lisa and told them how amazing Focus was and asked if they had any records for sale or anything. Some people even asked where they were from, which hurt Jens’s feelings because he’d been coming to these hardcore shows for a while and even some of the girls who were familiar to him, who he thought should probably recognize him, they still asked where Focus was from.

Jens bought some records from Adam, who said he tought dat de band sounded great—tight!—and dat e was glad dere were finally some women playing in de local scene. Jens said he’d fucked up a few parts, but thanks anyway. He was glad Adam thought they sounded good.

JoAnne, Lisa and Jens waited outside the YMCA with their gear. “Adam said we sounded tight,” Jens told his band-mates.

Lisa said how people were really excited and JoAnne said how she got the impression that this was a really male dominated scene, “like, maybe even more male than most.”

“What about all the girls who come out to shows?” Jens asked.

“Oh my God, they were so happy that women were playing,” Lisa said.

“One girl even said how she was going to ask that promoter, Trevor or whatever, if her band could play,” JoAnne said. “It was like maybe they’d never even thought they could ask.”

Jens said, “But is it really the scene’s fault if that girl has never thought to ask?”

Lisa looked at her feet.

JoAnne said, “Yeah. It is.”

They didn’t talk much more. Mahir picked them up and asked how the show had gone. He was very tired, though, so when Jens, who was even more enthusiastic to speak to Mahir than he’d been on the way to the show, tried to engage in conversation, Mahir just said, “Unh, hunh,” and, “Oh,” and, “Okay.” It was pretty discouraging for Jens who was feeling like maybe he was racist and maybe Mahir knew.

They dropped JoAnne off first. Once they’d dropped Jens off, Mahir asked Lisa if everything was okay.

“The show went great,” Lisa said. “People really liked us.”

“But?” Mahir asked.

“I don’t know.” Lisa said. “I guess that’s it.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” Lisa said. “Not tonight.”

As they got closer to home, Mahir had a thought. “Do you remember,” he asked, “a long time ago— You had just started school I think, and there was a boy in your class who went away for a while and you cried and cried.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You kept saying something over and over again. At first I couldn’t tell what it was, but eventually I could make out, ‘He’s so cute, he’s so cute,’ over and over.”

Lisa laughed a little bit.

“I think that was Jens.”

She looked out the window at the dark trees whipping past. “We went to primary school together, so.”

“I thought so.”

Over the next year Focus wrote four more songs, recorded a cassette, wrote another five songs and played school coffee houses and church basements and Masonic Lodges all over the place. They got to play, at different events, with both of the bands that Jens had seen at the Masonic Lodge that turned him on to hardcore.

When Nancy eventually came to see Focus, Lisa and JoAnne were both really nervous about it. Nancy loved the band. She said that she wanted to practice with JoAnne and Lisa again and that she’d found someone to record their album. Between songs at a Focus practice one afternoon, JoAnne and Lisa started talking about playing with Nancy and how frustrating she could be to work with and how much each of them—Lisa and JoAnne—felt like their old songs were still pretty good, but that they had moved on from where they’d been as musicians since they played with Nancy. So, it was a bit of a surprise to Jens when, a few practices later, Lisa and JoAnne told him that they thought that Focus should take a of a break so they could focus on their recording with Nancy.

It was a lonely experience for Jens. He’d been spending so much time with Lisa and JoAnne and now he only really saw them a their table in the cafeteria before school. It was during this hiatus from Focus that Jens decided that he was in love with Lisa. A few times he asked her if she wanted to come over, but she was always busy—studying, working on a project, practicing. Once he asked JoAnne if she wanted to come over—a sort of retaliation for Lisa being unavailable—and JoAnne was way more enthusiastic about the prospect, but she was “jamming” with her brother that night.

Lisa missed playing with Focus and even missed Jens, too, but things had started to go badly at home. One morning, on their drive to school, Mahir told Lisa that he and Deborah were separating and that he had rented an apartment near the school where Lisa would be welcome to stay, but that Deborah had agreed to drive Lisa once Mahir moved out. Lisa asked why they were separating. At first, Mahir didn’t want to say. Lisa didn’t push, but something about her silence, maybe, spurred Mahir to explain that Deborah and David, the contractor who had been slowly updating various rooms in their house, had been having an affair.

One morning Jens asked Lisa what was wrong, but she didn’t know what to say. A few days later, Lisa was desperate to tell him, but there was need written on Jens’s face that discouraged her, a need that was much different than her own, at least for the moment.

That Friday, Jens went alone to see one of their favourite bands at the YMCA. At the show, a girl named Melanie asked when Focus would be playing again. Jens told her that he didn’t know. Melanie said that they were her favourite band. Jens thanked her. She stood near him for each band and watched where he went in between performances. He wasn’t surprised when she asked him for a ride home. Nor was he surprised when, before she got out of the car, she leaned across the parking break and kissed him.

They exchanged phone numbers.

Jens thought about the kiss and about how nice kissing felt. He thought about Melanie. Then he thought about Lisa.

Melanie played bass, too, and she was eager to play music with Jens. Jens felt like if he wanted to keep making out with Melanie, to keep seeing Melanie, he had to start bringing a guitar to her house. He plugged into her bass amp, which she had to keep prohibitively quiet. They wouldn’t ever play for long enough to get anything done before they would push Melanie's stuffed animals aside and make out on her brass bed.

Mahir moved into a condo that you could see from the high school. Lisa helped him buy and arrange new furniture and he thanked her and kept saying how this wasn’t something someone’s child should have to help them do. She reassured him that lots of families had problems and that she thought she probably had more friends with parents who were divorced than she had friends with parents who were together still.

JoAnne, Lisa and Nancy had finished recording for their album. They had done a mix of it, too, and had all taken home copies to scrutinize. JoAnne had a page in her notebook dedicated to each song, even though on some pages she’d written only, “Sounds great.” Nancy had filled nine pages of lined notepaper front and back with notes about the mix and the performances. Lisa had nothing. When her friends asked her how she was, Lisa said she was fine, that she was sorry, that she would make some notes.

Lisa told Jens that she needed to listen to the mix and that she had a CD. Then she asked if, maybe they could drive around in his car and make notes. They drove down to the lake and along the lakeshore, pausing the CD and pulling over after each track so that Lisa could write their thoughts. It was after the fifth track that Lisa told Jens that her parents had separated. She did what she could not to cry. Jens turned off the car so that Lisa wouldn’t feel rushed. She said she was sorry. Jens said, “For what?” then tried to soften his response by adding, “you haven’t done anything wrong.” Lisa leaned over and put her arm around Jens’s neck and pulled him towards her. He hesitated because it reminded him so much of his first kiss with Melanie. But Lisa just wanted a hug. Jens’s hand accidentally brushed her breast as he tried to fit it between Lisa and the seat and he hated himself for even noticing.

When they started listening again, Jens pointed the car north. He didn’t know where he was going at first. After listening to the ninth track they pulled over on the side of Highway 24. Jens could see the Tim Horton’s where his Mom would buy him croissants whenever she picked him up from school. By the time they were done track ten, they could see their primary school. They paused the CD. Jens pulled in to the school’s small parking lot.

“You want to get out?” Jens asked.

“Yes,” Lisa said. “But we’ve got work to do.”

“Right.”

“Okay, what are we saying about that mix?” Lisa asked.

“Uh,” Jens held his hands up.

Lisa started writing her thoughts.

“It seems so small,” Jens said.

Lisa looked at him, her expression heading towards hurt, but currently stuck on confused.

Jens smiled. “The school.”

“I thought you meant the mix.”

“No. I thought the mix sounded good. Honestly, my ears are tired. Is that a thing? That’s a thing, I think.”

“I think that’s a thing.”

“Doesn’t the school seem small, though?”

Lisa looked at the red brick box of the gym, the rows of classroom windows, the two leaning cedars near the front door. “I guess. You know, I live nearby, though. So I see the school regularly. I mean, when’s the last time you saw the school?”

“I guess it’s been years.”

The air was just a bit cooler than either of them was dressed for. They stepped over a sagging length of chain between the parking lot and the asphalt where the girls used to skip and the boys used to play kickball. “I’m really sorry about your mom and dad,” Jens said.

“Thanks,” Lisa said.

They rounded the back of the school and the playground came into view.

“Your parents were never married or something, right?” Lisa asked.

“Yeah,” Jens said.

“How’d that work?”

“You’d have to ask them, I guess. I don’t know if I believe in marriage, though.”

“No?”

“Have you ever seen it work?”

“My grandparents, maybe. My mom’s mom and dad. I mean, they’re still together.”

“Does that mean it’s working?”

“Maybe not.”

They stopped on the hard packed sand around the jungle gym. Jens put his hands in his pockets.

“How’s Melanie?” Lisa asked.

Jens had forgotten all about Melanie. “Fine,” he said. “I don’t know,” he added.

“What don’t you know?”

“Ah,” Jens said. “I just don’t know.”

Lisa sat down on the foot of the slide.

“Do you remember,” Jens said, “I think I licked your arm under here.” He pointed to the small space under the platform at the top of the slide. “I don’t even know if I could still fit in there.” He squeezed sideways past the ladder and sat in the dark with his knees by his chin.

Lisa stood at the entrance. Jens couldn’t see the expression on her face when she said, “My dad remembers me crying about you one night. You’d gone away or something.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I kept saying, ‘He’s so cute, he’s so cute.’”

Jens swallowed.

Lisa said, “Shove over.”

They sat there in the dark with their knees at their chins, their sides pressed together. Lisa put her head on Jens’s shoulder. “It’s warmer under here,” she said.

Jens put his arm around her.

“I love you,” Lisa said.

Without thinking, Jens said, “I love you, too,” then his body started burning from his guts and his heart.

Eventually Lisa lifted her head. She removed Jens’s glasses and they kissed and for Lisa it was like all of her body became her lips and her mouth. For Jens it was like his body and the whole world around them and time had disappeared in this one shining moment.

Toronto, May 2016

Emoji sequence: Anne Peace, who is many amazing things, but also Lee's mum

Story: Lee Sheppard