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

Fellow Passengers

The person who served you your coffee assumed that you were a doctor. He, a small, dark brown man with an accent you wouldn’t presume to place, said, “Will that be all, Doctor?”

Your brain had to make sense of the mistake before you could say, “Yes. Yes, that’s it. Thanks.”

You sat down at your regular table. Two actual doctors, a pair of old white guys, were sitting a few tables away. One of them was hunched over a Tupperware container filled with sliced fruit, the other was staring off towards the elevators and twisting his wedding ring like he was trying to unscrew it but the threads were stripped. A few children raced past and a man with a deep voice said something sharp and foreign and one child stopped running and turned towards the man, then back towards his sibling or cousin who was still zigzagging and laughing. A different man with a sharper voice, a voice that made the ring-twisting doctor flinch, said the same foreign thing and the second child stopped, sat down and cried. One man, you didn’t know if it was the sharp voiced or deep voiced man, walked over to the crying child and picked them up then led both children back to where their family—at least three generations of it—was crowded around two tables as far to the side of the dining area as they could get.

The coffee was too hot. It wasn’t bad coffee, had never been bad coffee, but it wasn’t good either. It was an excuse for you to sit here, that’s all.

A man and a woman got off the elevator. You pulled a newspaper out of your black bag and set it on the table. While the man stepped back to look at the signs above each vendor’s counter, the woman looked around at the people sitting at the cafeteria tables. She made eye contact with you and smiled sadly. You nodded and looked down at your newspaper. Your arms bracketed the folded broadsheet and you rubbed your thumbs against the pads of your index and middle fingers, but your eyes watched the woman walk up to the man and the two exchange hushed words. The woman put her hand on the man’s far shoulder and the man raised his shoulder nearest the woman so that he could gently extract then bring his elbow over her head and hang his hand off her far shoulder. You saw then, maybe in the gesture or in the shape of their hands or their postures, that they were brother and sister. They walked to the new Hero Burger—it opened early last month—and started reading the menu. The man asked the server if they sold veggie burgers then the woman explained to the server that she has a severe nut allergy.

The doctors at the nearby table stood at the same time. They weren’t even looking at each other and if they had exchanged some signal you missed it. One of them, the one who was twisting his ring, said, “Well,” to which the other one replied, “Well.”

You agreed with them, but you didn’t stand right away because, well, leaving with them would be strange and obviously—you don’t know—collegial? Like they might have started talking to you about some doctory thing and you wouldn’t know what to say and your cover would have been blown which would have been devastating because what would you have done, what would you do without the hospital?

It was a year earlier you started coming here.

Okay, not quite.

Not really.

You started coming here, like, let’s see, uh fourteen months earlier. The regular visits anyway. At first you were coming with your partner whose cancer had come back and come back in more than one place, not just their beautiful brain. The surgeon who’d seen it said it was beautiful. You knew it was beautiful in its operation, in its functioning, in its living state. Something about the surgeon’s comment—meant as a lighthearted, even laudatory Nice work!—conjured a brain in a jar, your partner’s brain in formaldehyde on some surgeon’s shelf, admired for its shape, admired as a specimen or a teaching tool. “This is where we dream. This is where your balance comes from. This is where your memories live. This part here helps you form attachments.”

Thirteen months ago you were visiting your partner here because keeping pain from hammering that beautiful, dying brain required intravenous opiates. You asked your boss to fire you so you could collect E.I. while you and your partner’s mother sat in the hospital room watching her child drift further and further away. Other family came too, of course. You would leave the room and go for walks. The ubiquitous nurses and doctors were like the staff on or even the engine of the impressive ship the hospital was. The patients were the ship’s passengers, suffering on their way to the shores of either the continent of life or the continent of death, their families, their loved ones, their people anxiously traveling with them.

When you were younger you loved, even still you love, taking the bus and observing the person across the aisle, reading over the shoulder of the man or woman in front of you, closing your eyes and listening to the music escaping the headphones of the person next to you, closing your eyes and imagining what that music might be calling up or washing away for them. Thinking about this communion calls to your mind a jug being filled with water from two sources simultaneously. Or hundreds, thousands of people walking the banks of rivers, to the shores of lakes and oceans and pouring out jugs and water bottles and glasses like it is some religious festival. With this image you experience overwhelming warmth somewhere near the center of you.

Just under twelve months earlier you stopped having a reason to come here. And right away you missed it. The day of your partner’s funeral in the suburb where they grew up, you were also surrounded by many people, but it was different because you had all gathered for the same reason, the same grief, the same difficulty and it was a pain that you were perceived to be one of the main bearers of. As a consequence, so many of the people grieving, carrying their own hurt, came to you with the sweet hope of sharing and easing your hurt, but with the side-effect of adding their suffering to it.

Your partner’s favourite drag queen had been invited to perform and she was weeping her way through a second rendition of “When Doves Cry” when you got up, whispered to your partner’s mother that you were going to the washroom and walked out. Your heels were bleeding into your dress shoes by the time you reached the train station. Your train had just left and the next one wasn’t due for nearly an hour. You bought a coffee and sat on the platform waiting and enjoying the emptiness. A train traveling in the opposite direction stopped and a stream of people with their own lives and worries and griefs walked the same direction for the length of the platform, took the same stairs and one of two tunnels before going to their own cars or to get into the cars of friends, lovers, mothers, fathers or to get on the bus that would drop them where they needed to be. 

Sometime between then and when the train carrying you home was splashed in a burst of setting sunlight coming through a gap between two mountainous skyscrapers, you had decided—or come to know, really—that you were heading to the hospital.

You bought another coffee from the man who had mistaken you for a doctor and again he called you doctor.

When the elevator came and opened its doors, you walked on, but you were so occupied trying to find a way to hold your coffee without a creeping burn finding its way through your skin that you forgot to press a button to tell the elevator which floor to go to. You heard a muted conversation before a set of doors at the back opened up and a caretaker with his head down wheeled a cart across a tiny gap.

“Excuse me,” you said.

“Oh. Excuse me. No, God, pardon me.”

“It’s no trouble.”

Behind him was a vast area with canvas bins and silver-barred shelves with bottles and linens, its cinder-blocked walls marked black from contact with rubber stoppers that protected the corners of things. A short man with greased hair, probably Filipino, watched you slide out of the way of the cart, then bent back to his task, his arms and part of his head disappearing into a sack of canvas hanging from a stainless steel frame on large, grey, rubber wheels.

“Nice weather lately,” you said. “Looks like we might have a summer.”

“Fly season,” he said. He pressed the button for the fourth floor.

You reached over and pressed the button for the fifth floor to see where the conversation would go. “What’s that?”

“Seen ’em fucking everywhere. Flies. I mean having sex everywhere. I’m not a vulgar talker. Don’t use the F-word for emphasis.”

“Okay.”

“Anyone you talk to’s all delighted the weather’s getting warmer again, but when you work with garbage . . . ”

“I can see how warm weather might be a mixed blessing.”

“Mixed nothing. What’s the blessing?”

“When you aren’t at work?”

“You think I’ve got A/C? There’s a nice time in the evening where if I happen to be by the lake or— Nah, you’re right.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No need to be sorry. I’m just in a bad mood’s the truth. The weather is nice. The flies agree.” The elevator stopped, the doors dinged open and the caretaker pushed his cart out. “You have a good day, you hear?”

“You too.”

On the fifth floor you got out and did a circuit, careful not to spill your coffee. Most of the doors were closed, but you passed one that was open. A hunched nurse was sticking electrodes to the chest of a topless, bearded man.

You took the elevator back to the first floor.

Whoever had designed the hospital’s lobby had, either by carelessness or design, used ramps and gardens to obscure sightlines. If you were eight or maybe ten feet tall you would have been able to see the whole vast multileveled open space supported by regular columns and partitioned for various purposes. There was value, you thought, or beauty maybe in the way that the walls and the green life here seemed to direct you down safe, quiet, known paths—to lead you this way to the front doors, this way to the pharmacy or that way to the small, private sitting area where just over a year earlier you and your partner’s mother had discussed the details of your deathwatch rotation.

You heard singing and you followed the sound up a long ramp to a small courtyard outside of the gift shop. The plants lining the sides of the ramp obscured your view of the performer, but you could see a woman crying in a dirty bathrobe with clear tubes up her nose, could distinguish a decent version of “Purple Rain,” could sense an inexplicable heaviness in your body as if your feet and your arm—reaching for the banister and holding tight—knew something that you too smugly ignored. When you cleared the last plant, a rubber tree reaching its waxy leaves out into the walkway, you saw, smiling welcome, then smiling recognition, your partner’s favourite drag queen, the one who’d sang “When Doves Cry” twice at the funeral.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. All of your partner’s people had developed relationships here, especially in the last months of your partner’s life. You’d never seen the drag queen here before, but there was no reason to think that they didn’t perform regularly to lift the spirits of who? Well, the lady with emphysema all folded up like she was smoking outside on a cold day. There was a man with a new baby, or a bundle of fabrics in varying shades of white that had taken the basic shape of a new baby; a bald person—a hairless person actually—of no clear sex and no obvious age; a woman whose body seemed tired, who had bags under her eyes, but who otherwise seemed well. Two boys too young to be alone sat up on the edge of one of the concrete planters. The larger boy, was hammering his heels against the wall he was sitting on. The smaller boy was pulling pieces of fern off the plant and dropping the pieces to the floor.

You didn’t feel like you could leave, but you were desperate to. How would the conversation with the drag queen go? “What are you doing here?” would certainly be a question, most likely the first one. “Oh, you know, this is what I do now. I come here.”

A man wearing Madras shorts and a sweatshirt with the hood up came out of the gift shop and handed the boys on the wall’s edge a package of wine gums each then lifted them both down simultaneously.

“Hey, you don’t pay,” came a voice from the gift shop.

The hooded man turned back even as he began walking down a ramp, his hand on the boys’ backs pushing them, guiding them.

“He no pay,” said the voice. The small woman who ran the gift shop with her husband came out the doors, looked at the crowd and pointed in the direction the man and his sons had disappeared in.

No one in the crowd moved.

You smiled. You stood. You walked past the drag queen, held your palms up and shrugged while mouthing the word “Sorry.”

“Hey,” the woman said. As you rounded the corner, you saw that she had spotted a security guard who turned towards her. “That man with two boy, again he no pay.” The security guard nodded, turned and ran in the direction the hooded man was walking.

You slowed down and took a relieved breath. Your heart was racing; you put your hand over your chest as if to calm it.

By the time you passed the security guard, he had caught up to the man and his sons and he was saying, “Well, why’d you bring them if you were going to steal?”

The hooded man mumbled something in reply.

“Well, this is not the first time you’ve stolen something here. You shouldn’t have brought them if you knew you were going to steal.”

You could see the glass doors to the street, students passing with their backpacks and side bags and white headphones, a businessman on his cell phone.

It was time to go home, for the day anyway.

Toronto, April 2016

Emoji sequence: Angel Rendal, writer, blogger, contributor to Vol. 2 of The West Enders

Story: Lee Sheppard

Day Two

It’s only your second day on the beach and already you’re not sure you’re glad—actually, you’re sure you’re not glad—that you let your sister convince you to come. Already you’re sick of how everything here, even your older sister, Melanie, makes you feel old. Or bad. She is fit, tanned, organized, disciplined. Always laughing.

Melanie is not really single, but she and Eric, who isn’t really her boyfriend, “I mean, what does boyfriend really mean, anyway,” have an open thing, or “Kind of a polyamorous, um, arrangement,” which you take to mean that Eric is gay, or a little gay anyway, and that it doesn’t matter how perfect your older sister is, dude still wants dick. This is probably a jealous and not overly sophisticated view of things that reflects more your own frustration at your seeming inability to hold on to anyone (David) or anything (David), to produce, elicit, exert the kind of gravity that could hold someone (David) to you. To have held David to you.

Okay, so, the scene: you are in a chaise lounge sometimes drifting towards sleep and sometimes not looking at, but acutely aware of the one fold in your tummy, a deep fold that you have to be basically lying down to eliminate. You are in a chaise lounge on this huge beach that seems to stretch infinitely to your left and infinitely to your right. You are on this huge beach that seems to be playing host to every white young person your age, all from back home even though this beach is attached to a country that your parents would call “Third World,” and that you’ve heard called “Developing,” but no matter what description a person attaches to this place they’re just calling it poor. Recognizing that it is impoverished. There are people from this country here. They ask you to buy things or they bring you drinks and act super nice, then they try and get out of the way, most of them do anyway, because they are an interruption of the illusion whoever is behind all of this is trying to create.

Your sister is stretching in front of your chaise. On her chaise is her towel, which you had to admit is the softest towel you’ve ever felt when your sister made you feel it and asked, “Isn’t that just the softest towel you’ve ever felt?” On the towel is the book she’s reading—something about money and how to make the money you have make more money for you. These things don’t make you feel old, but they make you feel bad.

What makes you feel old is the way your sister, whose stretching is really an elaborate yoga routine designed to highlight her strength, her flexibility and her ass, is drawing the attention of all the guys walking by and all the girls, too, who are trying, and failing, to ignore her.

No, it isn’t that, either.

It’s that she fucked one of the dancers last night, one of the locals handsome enough and with good enough English that they are paid to take women on trips around the dance floor. The guys who work here, in this capacity in the hotels on this stretch of beach, hotels marketed to young people, these are the pick of the crop guys. Top notch. What made you feel old, though, is that you went with your sister, Melanie, to the “club” where all this shit happens, but you had to come home because you couldn’t keep your eyes open. You went back to your room and passed out only to be woken up four hours later by Melanie and this guy Carlos, Melanie being all like, “Could we have a few minutes? Would you mind?”

You sat out on the balcony and willed the sound of the waves to drown out Melanie screaming and moaning into Carlos’s shoulder or the pillow or whatever, to drown out Carlos speaking rapid Spanish.

When it was all over, Melanie slid open the glass door and thanked you. She was still catching her breath. You went and lay down for a bit, but couldn’t get back to sleep. The sun was coming up, so you went for a walk.

That made you feel old.

But the real thing that makes you feel old is you. You have a kid back home and you miss her. As much as you would like to be with somebody, would like to like to be having a good time—actually you’ve not really felt much like having sex since Alice was born—you are just spending all your time thinking about your sweet girl back home with Mum and Dad.

When you see a bikinied woman walking with two guys, hanging off one of their arms, you imagine Alice in a few years and worry about her safety. You don’t imagine yourself in that girl’s shoes, that girl’s bikini top, your breasts a carefully framed and managed object of desire, a lure to help you snag what? Sex, certainly. Companionship. Intimacy. You imagine your breast in Alice’s hungry mouth, her crying mouth. You remember your vulva stretching to accommodate Alice, to welcome Alice. The thought of allowing some giggling doofus on vacation to root around in there looking for his own pleasure, his own gratification, a confirmation of his desirability, whatever else he might be trying to find inside you? Well, it isn’t appealing. Or worse, letting a paid someone perform for you? Would they feel they are earning a living or receiving a tip? Maybe both.

The beach was beautiful this morning. It was quiet, the sun sitting low behind the hotels. Some grey-hairs walked along the shoreline, taking advantage of the fact that many of the people in the hotels on this stretch of sand had just gone to bed. You smiled at them, grateful of the presence of people at a less desperate stage of life than most of your peers. Some of them smiled back. Many of them smiled back. Some of them looked at you like you were violating the natural order being there at that time, being up then. You wanted to ask them about their children, assuming they have or had children, to relate to them adult to adult. 

You were wearing your pajamas: loose blue sweatpants with fraying laces cinching the waist; a black tank-top you purchased because its neckline could be pulled down to comfortably accommodate your breast; no bra.

There was a short, dark man in white pants, sandals and a light blue golf shirt with the hotel’s crest embroidered above his heart. He had a short spear that he used to impale a plastic cup. Then he brought the pierced cup to his shoulder, which was covered by the lip of a garbage bag, and he used his shoulder to detach the cup, which disappeared down the mouth of the bag.

You sat down on the foot end of a chaise and watched him perform the same action with a cigar butt, then a cigarette butt. It made you want a cigarette, then a coffee. You looked toward the dining area then back in the direction of your room. The surf sound soothed you with its crashing.

You straddled the chaise, put your hands on the arm rests and brought your butt back so you could settle into the seat, so you could lie against the backrest. You hugged yourself because the wind was whispering chill thoughts against your skin. You weren’t cold exactly.

Breathing the beach air was different without all your peers, without your sister. Without thinking about it you closed your eyes and listened to the conversations of the passing people, listened to the waves carrying on their crashing conversation with the sand.

Your arm.

Something was touching your arm.

You opened your eyes. It was yellow. There was a yellow thing on your arm.

It was one of the cheap, faded yellow towels that were folded and stacked by the pool, that the housekeeping staff left in the closet of your room each morning. “Pardon, Señora.” The garbage man was standing over you. “You were cold, yes?”

“Thank you.”

“I no mean to wake you.”

The beach traffic had picked up slightly and the sun was throwing your shadow and his shadow into the surf. “No,” you shook your head. “It’s no problem.”

He bent down and lifted his garbage bag from the sand to his shoulder again. It had clearly gotten fuller, heavier. He grabbed his spear from where it was leaning against the chaise. “Pardon for molest, Señora. For disturb you.”

You laughed. “I really appreciate it.” You lifted a corner of the towel. “You’re very thoughtful.”

He stood there a moment.

“Lovely morning,” you said.

“Bery beauty here.”

“Yes,” you said. “It is.”

His eyes searched the beach for the next piece of refuse.

“Are you from around here?”

“Aroun’ here?”

You pointed vehemently at the sand beside the chaise. “Um, here. Do you live here?”

“No. Beach por visitors. We live . . .” He held his spear in the air and waved it towards the hotel, but at a pace and amplitude that suggested far past the hotel. “Away.”

“Are you from here?”

“From?”

“Were you born here?”

“Ah. No, bery far. Maybe two hours in car. Small place, yes? Is small.”

“A nice place?”

“Nice? Yes. My wife and children, yes? They live there.”

“And you live here?”

“Yes.” He noticed some people behind you. “Buenos dias,” he said. “Good morning.”

A man and a woman in his and hers Lululemon running outfits and garishly neon sneakers jogged past without acknowledging the garbage man. When they reached the edge of the surf they ran in place and squinted down the beach in both directions trying to decide which way to go.

“My name’s Sarah,” you said.

“Bery nice to meet you, Sarah.”

“It’s lovely to meet you. What’s your name?”

“Alejandro. You call me Alex.”

“Okay, Alex.” You smiled.

Alex nodded. “Yes.”

“You were saying that your family lives two hours away?”

“Yes.”

“How old are your kids?”

“Keeds?”

“What?”

“What you say? Keeds?”

Your Catholic aunt from Northern Ontario often chastises you for saying kids, which she says is an American thing. “Your children,” you say. “How old are your children?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. My niño is eight and my niña is five.”

“Niño means boy? Son?”

“Yes. His name is Jorge.”

You repeated the name.

“Is George for you.”

You reassured Alex that you can say it the Spanish way.

“Is good. Bueno.”

“And your Niña?” you ask.

“Her name is Ester.”

“They are beautiful names,” you say, though you really mean, ‘Thanks for talking to me, keep talking to me.’ 

“You think so?”

“Sure.

“Is . . . I worry, you know, they will think is too plain.”

“No.”

“Is no too plain?”

“Not where I’m from.”

“Is not many George or Ester there?”

“Not to many.”

“You have Keeds?”

“Yes,” you laugh. “One. A niña, a daughter. Alice.”

“Bery nice.”

You smiled thinking about her and about the plane that would fly you home to her in five more days.

“You sad here.”

“I miss her.”

“Is sad for me, too. What is word? Lonely?”

You nodded and looked at Alex.

He smiled.

“How often do you see your family?”

“Ebery four weeks, yes?”

“Wow.”

“Is weeks, yes? Is how you say?”

“Yeah weeks.”

“Yes.”

Your eyes teared up at the thought of not seeing Alice for four weeks.

“Pardon,” he said.

“It’s fine,” you said. “I can’t imagine the hardship.”

“Bery sorry. Is vacation for you.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“What is hardship?”

“Difficulty. Trouble.”

“Okay. Hardship. Is Alice with her papa?”

The story of Alice’s papa sits like a pound of wet clay somewhere in the region of your diaphragm. This morning, when Alex reminded you of it, you had to shift in your seat to make room for its heavy, slimy mass.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Is not my business.”

“We’re sharing,” you said. “His name was David. Is David,” you began. You skipped the part about David being in a band that you listened to and that your coworker knew; skipped the part about how nervous you were to meet him; skipped the part about how artfully and purposefully he drew you out and how his seeming interest in drawing you out, his seeming determination to draw you out, was part of the art. His art. “He was visiting town for . . . Well, for work.” You skipped that they were spending a month recording at a studio in Kensington Market, that the first night you met him, drinks at the Rivoli with your coworker and some people he’d gone to film school with, that he was sober, but you had too many Manhattans and he kissed you by the bathrooms but refused your offer to take him home with you because you were drunk and he didn’t want to take advantage. ‘I’ll call you as soon as I sober up,’ you said. ‘I’m in the studio all day tomorrow,’ he said. ‘What are you doing tomorrow night?’ you asked. ‘Fucking you, I guess,’ he said, but he blushed. You didn’t tell Alex the part about how David came to your parent’s house that first night because you’d forgotten that it was your aunt’s birthday and he said it was fine, he could see you another night, but you said, ‘No, come,’ and he did and afterwards he stayed the night and you guys, the two of you, did something that at the time and for a while afterwards you would have called making love it was so gentle and respectful. “We fell in love,” you told Alex. “I thought we were in love.”

“Yes,” Alejandro said, meaning, ‘Go on.’

“I got pregnant right away,” you told Alejandro.

He winced.

David stayed with you for the month the band was in town. Your period was due on the Tuesday of the third week. When it didn’t come, David bought the pregnancy test at a drugstore near the studio and stood in the bathroom with you as you held it between your legs and peed on it. You were both happy, at least in each other’s presence. David kept saying, Wow. You’d fantasized about having children together, about living in the country together, about having peacocks.

David wrote a song ‘Inspired by you,’ and played it for you on the night before he went back home. You guys talked on the phone, sometimes twice a day. They were touring, playing in Pittsburgh the night that he called you to say he thought you should have an abortion. He was in Columbus when he called to apologize. When the band got home from tour, he came back to the city and the two of you found a bigger apartment together.

“We were together for,” you looked out at the surf while you did the calculations, “for almost a year, but . . . ”

David was skeptical of home birth, but you were determined to try it. Your apartment was so close to St. Joe’s that he joked that he would pick you up and carry you to the hospital if something went wrong. David was there when Alice was born on the futon your parents bought you when you turned fifteen. David was there for three weeks afterwards then he had to go back home to rehearse with the band for their European tour.

“. . . But he was, he is a musician and he has to travel a lot.”

“I understand,” Alex told you.

‘I’m— ’ David said. ‘I . . . I don’t think I’m coming back here. I’m not coming back here after Europe.’ He said he loved you and he loved Alice, but he wasn’t in love with you and that, besides, he couldn’t be present enough to be the dad that he wanted to be. Then he expected to stay the night. You told him to get out. You told him you knew that he was out on the road fucking fans, though you didn’t know that at all, but it was just a suspicion you’d been living with. You told him again to get out, that you couldn’t stand to see him. He spent the night at the bus station and took a Greyhound home in the morning.

In the year since, you haven’t had a chance to meet anyone new. You have seen David so that he could see Alice. You tried to arrange with him to look after her while you and Melanie were here, but he was scheduled to play a festival in Whistler, is probably playing in Whistler right now.

Melanie has finished stretching and she heads to the ocean’s edge. With the exception of the short nap that Alex woke you from, you still haven’t slept since she chased you from the room so she could fuck Carlos. You look around the beach, hoping to see Alex. Alejandro. Three guys walk by, two of them checking you out. One of them farts loudly. Another one says, “Oh!” and puts his forearm over his nose and mouth. All three break out in laughter. You give the air a minute to clear and walk to the water’s edge.

Melanie is standing out in the low waves. “Coming in?” she asks.

You tell her you are going back to the room for a nap.

She nods. She’s disappointed. “Are you okay?”

You hesitate before saying yes.

“You want to talk about it?”

You want to push her head underwater and hold it there is what you want. You want to go home.

You shake your head, No. “I just need some rest,” you tell her, and it’s true. Sleep helps your bad moods more than anything else.

“Okay,” she says, like you need her permission. “What if I need something from the room, though?”

“Whatever,” you say. “Just come in if you need to.”

On your way back to the room, you turn over the number of different things you should have said to her about last night, about Carlos, about how you are only here because Melanie convinced you she wanted to do something nice for you.

Getting away from the beach calms you down. More people here have shirts on. You don’t see Alejandro anywhere. What do you want from him? Nothing. Sensible talk. Talk about things that matter to you.

There is a woman in your room, cleaning. She has almost no English other than, Pardon, Finish soon, and You’re welcome. You stand and watch her make your bed for who knows how long before she looks at you and says, “Pardon, finish soon,” and holds her hand out to Melanie’s bed. You sit down on the edge of it and watch the woman’s hands work at folding and flattening the sheets.

When was the last time you made the bed at home? Had you even made the bed before you left for the airport to fly here?

David used to always make the bed. He loved crawling under the covers when the sheets had been straightened, flattened out. You made fun of him for it, but you miss it, you miss those kindnesses.

You manage not to cry before the woman leaves, but you forget to give her a tip.

You take off all your clothes. The sheets feel cool and clean and smell of some sort of pleasant chemical. You hear someone, a man, shout from a nearby pool. People laugh in reply. The sounds are muted and thus relegated so some space where rather than annoy you they can mingle with your memories in a gentle, nostalgic way. The sounds of youthfulness all around you become like birdsong, unfamiliar and beautiful.

Signifying nothing.

Toronto, March 2016

Emoji sequence: Meghan  Scott, the Fashion Director of Odalisque Magazine

Story: Lee Sheppard 

Patented High Quality

Yuh opened Patented Highest Quality Aesthetics ten years ago with money from cleaning houses. In those ten years yuh had earned and kept many loyal customers. One a them, maybe the most loyal, was a white lady, Mrs. Culverhouse, Helen, who drove down to your neighbourhood and parked her fancy cars—first a red BMW convertible, then a green Jaguar in the shop’s ten years—out front of PHQA. The man them from the barbershop would come out and walk around the car. Young men on their way past would walk slowly, getting eyes full but too proud to stop and admire.

Long before PHQA, since a few weeks after yuh arrived here, yuh’d cleaned Mr. and Mrs. Culverhouse’s home in the country. A bungalow spread out over the top of a hill at the heart of a lovely yard. Yuh loved driving down the long lane, the trees reaching out fi your car as yuh drove slowly past, the gravel crunching and popping under your tires, a sound yuh found peaceful but that put fear in yuh, fear fi the undercarriage of your Civic, fear of what Desmond would say. Your light-skinned husband with the dark heart, Rest In Peace not that he deserves it. Yuh just do not want him haunting yuh more than he already does.

The Culverhouse’s bungalow was filled with dove pictures and dove sculptures, even dove salt and pepper shakers. One day Mrs. Helen explained that Culverhouse was an old English word fi dovecote, the place people keep their doves. Though there was one room in the basement, Mrs. Helen’s office, that was filled with rabbits and she said that it was because her maiden name was Warrener and growing up she’d always been told that a Warrener was someone who kept a rabbit warren, but that her father had misunderstood and that you keep a rabbit hutch, not a warren and the name Warrener was more properly a game keeper, but weren’t the rabbits cute?

Earlier this week, yuh got a call. The woman on the phone sounded like Mrs. Helen despite her bent up, unsteady voice. She told yuh that, “My mother, my mom, Hel—”

Yuh waited fi her to go on, but the whine of agony told yuh what Mrs. Helen’s daughter—yuh guessed Jennifer—was about to say.

Jennifer took a deep breath through her nostrils and it reminded yuh so much of Mrs. Helen that yuh started crying right there in the front window reception desk of Patented High Quality Aesthetics. Jennifer said, “Your friend, Helen Culverhouse she’s—”

It meant a lot that she said, Your friend, that she understood enough to know that the two of yuh were friends.

Eventually Jennifer could say, “She’s dead, my mom is dead.”

Yuh thanked her fi telling yuh.

“Pardon,” she said.

“Thank yuh,” yuh enunciated as clearly as your grief and your accent allowed, “fi letting me know,” yuh added.

The funeral was in two days time and there would be a visitation. “Would you consider doing, we would like you to do mom’s nails. We’d pay you, of course.”

Yuh looked at your appointment book. Yuh looked at Sharon working on that young girl’s nails, her mother waiting patiently fi yuh in the next chair, looking away from yuh out of embarrassment at or maybe respect fi the tracks of your tears. Yuh closed your eyes and imagined asking Selah, your daughter, to take a day from classes tomorrow to work in the shop. She would understand and one day would not make or break her midwifery studies, but she was still sensitive to any request to miss school because when she was a youth yuh and Desmond had so often required her help looking after her younger brothers.

“Mrs. Gordon?” Jennifer said.

“Me sorry, Dear. Yes, of course me do it.”

“How much would you like? Money.”

“Thirty dollars is the normal fee fi manicures,” yuh said. Yuh considered doing it fi free, sat with your mouth open fi a few seconds trying to coax the offer out, but Toronto rents were changing and the shop needed some updating and, wait, where were yuh going to have to drive to? “Where a Mrs. Helen?” yuh asked.

“What? I’m sorry.”

“Where is Mrs. Helen?”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Jennifer explained to yuh where the funeral home was. Yuh wrote the address and directions down on an old page in the appointment book. She gave yuh the name of the funeral home’s director and yuh wrote that down, too.

“So thirty dollars, then,” Jennifer asked.

“That’s fine,” yuh said.

Yuh forgot to ask why Mrs. Helen died.

The woman whose nails yuh were working on wanted to talk to yuh, to boast about her beautiful daughter being spoiled by Sharon in the next chair over, and yuh knew from the pauses when to say, Oh, and, Yes?, and, Wow, but honestly yuh were only hearing sound and occasional words and phrases like honour roll and scholarship and special treat. Sharon, bless her, was asking questions to cover up fi your distraction.

What was the conversation like when they decided to get the black lady mother loved so to come out fi do her nails and was Mr. Culverhouse part of the decision? When yuh pictured the girls, yuh pictured photos at least ten year’s old, photos in frames yuh’d dusted every month. Never had yuh found the courage, or the desire really, to go to the birthday parties Helen always invited yuh and your family to. Yuh’d known Mr. Culverhouse because he had been in advertising and sometimes he worked from home, was working from home when yuh’d brought ideas fi the sign fi the shop to Mrs. Helen fi her to look over. Helen was enthusiastic at first, but something in Mr. Culverhouse’s face was saying, No, no, no, all wrong and Helen seen it too and she chased Mr. away back to his home office. She told yuh that she’d talk to him later, but that she thought Patented High Quality Aesthetics Copyright was redundant and to maybe lose Copyright. The whole time, though, yuh were nervously doodling, a little left to right loop dropping down then coming back up level with the starting point. Helen saw it and said, That’s it. What’s that? That’s beautiful. Yuh told Helen how yuh’d done it fi as long as yuh could remember, that when yuh were a girl and yuh finished your school work yuh would fill up notebook page after notebook page with this loop and think about whatever yuh needed to think about to keep yourself from talking and upsetting your teachers. She said to put it on the sign. “It’s so free. So simple, but so free. Like a signature.” Yuh had a signature, of course and yuh thought she was calling yuh uneducated. So yuh wrote her a long thank you letter fi her help with the store sign and mailed it off and yuh thought even the Queen would have been impressed by your diction and grammar and it’s true yuh could write, can write beautiful, proper English. Yuh signed your full name on that letter and when Mrs. Helen Culverhouse came down to PHQA that first time she said to yuh, “I had no idea what a lovely name you have, Mrs. Prudence Honor Cerene Stephenson Duncan,” then added, “The sign is fabulous,” because even though she vexed yuh with that comment about yuh not having no signature, yuh loved that down dropping and up swinging loop so yuh’d had it put on the end of the sign like yuh had doodled even on that. She asked if yuh would put the loop on one of her nails. “With sparkles, please.” Yuh did it fi the first time on Mrs. Helen Culverhouse and so it did become your signature because no nail, not even the longest artificial nail, would fit Prudence Honor Cerene Stephenson Duncan. Even just PHCSD was too long to fit on someone’s pinky finger. Of course yuh no sign everyone’s hand, but some people yuh offered it to and some people asked yuh fi do it. When Mrs. Helen come the next time, she ask fi it again, but she said, laughing, “Doug hates it.” Doug was Mr. Culverhouse.

After Sharon and yuh finished the proud mother and her high-achieving daughter’s nails, Sharon asked yuh what was the matter and yuh managed not to cry as yuh told her Mrs. Helen died. Sharon touched your arm and shoulder like that might help. Yuh thanked her and called Selah to arrange fi her to take your appointments tomorrow. Selah had met Mrs. Helen a number of times over the years and terms Mrs. Helen sometimes used, like “you people” or “your people” or even “new Canadians,” bothered Selah. Yuh admired your daughter fi that, but told her yuh cyaan judge Mrs. Helen too harsh fi the limits of what she knows and that includes what she knows and doesn’t know to say. When yuh explained to Selah why yuh had to miss the day, when yuh explained that Mrs. Helen died, Selah just said, “I’m sorry Mum. I know how much you two loved each other.” You had to go to the bathroom to cry, her words touched yuh so.

Yuh slept well and woke happy that yuh hadn’t dreamed.

To reach the funeral home was easy. Take the highway to East Beach View Lane, turn right and go until you see Morton’s Funeral Centre, Willowwood Chapel. Yuh parked Desmond’s Lincoln—yuh still thought of it as Desmond’s car—in the back lot and yuh actually felt disappointed that it was paved and there were no stones to go popping off the wheels and pinging against the under parts of the car. Yuh remember that when Desmond died, it was Mrs. Helen convince you to tek the Lincoln and give the Civic to Selah. Yuh felt like a queen driving the Lincoln the first time, though yuh felt like yuh needed to apologize to Desmond before yuh turn the key in the ignition. Not no more. Yuh treat that car so fine, yuh sometimes feel like Desmond just was taking care of it fi yuh.

The doors to Morton’s were locked. Yuh checked your watch, then looked in the windows fi business hours. Yuh saw an intercom with a little black button. Yuh pressed it and a woman with a grey skirt and matching jacket came waving and stocking-footed from some back room. She called, “Sorry, sorry, coming, coming.” She was the granddaughter of the Mr. Morton who opened the funeral home, but you didn’t catch her name.

Mrs. Helen was in a workroom off a narrow hallway. There was a framed picture of her on a table beside an open black briefcase filled with makeup. Yuh looked there first because yuh weren’t ready to see your friend. “Take your time,” the granddaughter said. “My father will be with you in a minute.” There was a free metal cart which yuh assumed was left there fi yuh. Yuh put your bag down on it, a purse yuh once or twice used to take nail stuff to a friend’s house. Quickly, yuh looked towards Helen Culverhouse. They’d done a nice job of making her look like her lovely self. A fine, adjustable, rolling stool was sitting up by her face, her head, her shoulders. Yuh grabbed the stool by its ergonomic backrest and rolled it away from there. Yuh shivered like yuh were cold.

The chair and table were on Helen’s left so you brought them around her feet. Yuh always started on a person’s right hand. Helen asked yuh once if there was a reason fi that. “Me never noticed me did it,” yuh told her. Since then yuh’d come up with a few explanations, but, “Just because,” was the truest one. Yuh nearly said something to Helen about it before yuh remembered she was dead.

Yuh jumped when yuh heard a voice, “I see you’ve made yourself at home, Mrs. Gordon.” The tall man half smiled at you. “Apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you.” His hair was blond and white, the colours all mixed up and warring like in an old-time battle with swords or cutlass where yuh have to come face to face with your enemy.

“That’s alright, me hope. That I made myself at home?”

“I’m finished,” he said. “She’s all yours.”

“Thanks,” yuh said before yuh had a chance to really hear what he was saying.

He held out his hand. It was cold and soft. “My name is Andrew Morton. My father started this business fifty years ago. It’s our anniversary year.”

“Congratulations.”

“Business is always good.”

Yuh smiled, trying to be a good guest.

He bent his head forward and raised his eyebrows. A practiced gesture. Then, with his hand open towards Helen he asked, “Is this your first time?”

Yuh were too shook by how easily he switched into sympathy to take in his question.

“Mrs. Gordon? Have you worked with a . . . a corpse before?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry about hurting her. She can’t feel anything.”

Yuh nodded.

“I understand you were friends?”

“That’s my understanding, too.”

He laughed too loud then put his hand on your upper arm. “That was funny, Mrs. Gordon. Do you have instructions?”

“Me spoke with her daughter, but,” yuh paused, then shook your head.

He pulled a pile of neatly folded notes out of his left pocket and opened a few before he found the right one. “Let’s see. Mr. Culverhouse says, ‘Do what she liked. Subdued colour. No loop, please.’”

Yuh nodded. “Thank you Mr. Morton.”

He touched your arm again. “Call me Andrew.”

“Thank you.”

“Is an hour enough time?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He reached inside his coat and pulled out a narrow envelope. “This is for you.”

He was gone before yuh thought to ask how Mrs. Helen died.

Yuh opened the envelope and saw a fifty-dollar bill inside. Quietly yuh went to your purse and found a twenty-dollar bill, but when yuh took the fifty out, yuh saw the note. “Keep the change. —Doug.” Yuh set it all down—the $50, your $20, Doug’s note—on the cart’s metal top.

Helen’s right hand was folded awkwardly, her pinky tucked up under her ring finger. It wasn’t cold, objectively. Yuh were trying to stay objective. The hand was room temperature. And it felt heavier now. Of course as yuh arranged her hand and fingers she wasn’t helping yuh work against gravity like she normally would.

Her outfit was made of a lovely material, but it was a heavy blue. Navy. Yuh’d never seen her in anything so dark and it seemed to team up with the rich brown she died her hair in an attempt to overwhelm her face. “Who picked this outfit?” Yuh asked her. “Maybe it was one of your favourites, Mrs. Helen. How me know?” Yuh opened your bag. The nail polish bottles rattled around as you ran your hands through them. It was too loud. Plus, it was hard to see the colours, despite the bright bank of lights overhead. Yuh set the bottles out one by one along the edge of the cart. “What we have here?” Yuh picked up a fluorescent orange. It leapt out against the blue of the suit. Yuh giggled. “What Doug say to that funeral director? Keep the colour subdued? Yuh think this one subdued enough Mrs. Helen? No, me no think so neither.” Yuh turned back to your row of bottles. “A nice red, maybe? Leaning towards orange.” Yuh picked it and placed it next to the fabric. “Me think so.”

Yuh massaged and moisturized her hand. It was once the cream was on that yuh worried that it might not take the same way it used to. “Me know yuh like this Mrs. Helen, but me hope we don’t need wipe the lotion off before me leave.” It was while yuh filed her nails that yuh asked, “So, what happened to yuh? Yuh not old enough fi this.” Yuh remembered her fight with breast cancer, but assumed she would have told yuh if it come back. “Me not think to ask someone yet. Yuh look good, though, so me no think yuh were hit by no car.” Yuh laughed. “Yuh too young fi this, Mrs. Helen.” Yuh worked quietly fi a while.

It was while yuh were painting the nails on her left hand, when yuh were nearly done, that yuh said to her, “Yuh remember we used to talk about Desmond, my husband, he haunts me. Not in no poltergeist way. He not what we call back home a duppy. A spirit. A ghost. He haunts my mind, though.” Yuh wiped at your eyes. “Me a miss our chats, Mrs. Helen. Helen. Me know yuh prefer just Helen.” Yuh finished the last nail. “Maybe yuh can fit me into your haunting schedule? Even once a month, like regular? Or once a week like when me used to clean your house?” Yuh put the red nail polish in the bag. Yuh started to clear the other bottles off the tray, but got distracted by the money yuh had left there.

Before you put the fifty in your wallet, yuh found a pen in your purse and wrote on the bottom of Doug’s note, “Please find your twenty dollars change in this envelope. —Prudence.” Yuh added your loop after your name and it made yuh laugh. “What you think of that, Helen?” Yuh laughed again.

Yuh looked at the remaining bottles of polish. The neon orange was still there. “This a beautiful, fi true Mrs. Helen. I know yuh agree.” Yuh laughed again and wondered if someone heard you would they think yuh sound like some villain in a Hollywood movie. “A final touch.” Yuh put the loop on the pinky of her left hand. “My signature, Helen. Yuh be sure to tell anyone yuh meet from now on where yuh got your nails done.” Yuh held her hand and blew on the nail. Then yuh just held her hand. When yuh were sure the nails were dry, you tucked the pinky with your signature under her ring finger. “I hope you can keep a secret, Helen.” Yuh finished packing up, then stood there holding your things.

When you finally decided to do it, yuh put your bags down on the chair and leaned over your friend. “Thank yuh,” yuh told her. “Me love yuh, Mrs. Helen.” Yuh kissed her cheek, then examined it carefully. “Me think yuh make-up still okay. And me no leave no lipstick mark.”

Yuh touched her hand one last time before yuh gathered your things and headed fi the door, reminding yourself to ask someone why she died.

Toronto, Feb. 2016

Emoji Sequence: Renata Janiszewska, artist and educator

Story: Lee Sheppard

Note: I am not a Jamaican or a Jamaican-Canadian woman. I was inspired by the books Lionheart Gal; Life Stories of Jamaican Women by Sistren with Honor Ford-Smith and A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. Also kicking around in my brain somewhere is the work of d’bi young, Afua Cooper and the play Da Kink in my Hair by Trey Anthony.