Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ the metro station I unscrewed the lid and sniffed. It was a kind of hot ginger broth, something lemony and spicy and just a little bit sweet. I drank a dozen tiny sips, standing right there on the platform, and my stomach quietened. I finished it off in a corner of the tiny fluoro-lit staff room on my break, and felt replenished and clear-sighted, as though an ounce of grit had been sluiced from behind my eyes.

      That same afternoon I was fired for turning in a wonky swan. Really it wasn’t so much the wonky swan as my “shitty attitude” about the wonky swan, about the towels in general. My general carelessness. The wonky swan was just one example. I had little grounds to argue. I finished out the afternoon, resisting the temptation of petty vengeances; mixing up the hand soaps and hair products, folding towels to resemble labia.

      Jody congratulated me when I told him, as though my leaving had been a matter of integrity, my personal choice. He insisted on cooking a celebratory dinner. Something had flicked on in him, and though I knew I wouldn’t keep the meal down, I couldn’t refuse. All he really knew how to cook was fish, he said, promising that when spring came and we could crack the windows and doors, he’d blow the roof off with scampi, jambalaya, gumbo, things that wanted all-day bubbling to stickiness on the stove, reeking up the kitchen. But for now he was keeping it fresh and simple: kingfish puffing steam from a little tinfoil papoose; kipflers and some kind of greens on the side.

      I chewed slow and careful. During a long silence, I nodded at the skis. Nobody’s going to want those when spring comes, I warned him once I’d managed to swallow. You’re not going to be able to resell them. You should at least try them out.

      I’m going to.

      You’ll need to get all the other truck, I told him.

      Yup.

      Poles and boots. Proper gloves. All that lark.

      Truck, he echoed. Lark. Do you speak that way in real life?

      This isn’t real life? I asked. Then I realized that if one of us didn’t think so, it probably wasn’t.

      Maybe I’ll take them back with me.

      What can you do with skis in Louisiana? I tried to sound indifferent, but a slatey, astringent saliva had flooded my mouth. The something-or-other glands, I’d learned in those first weeks of class.

      I forced a forkful of the kingfish and another of potato, but the acid in my mouth slurred the flavors of everything, and the textures became repulsive. I gagged, tried to swallow, gagged again, spat into a slice of bread and wadded it up like a napkin. Jody was staring at me.

      So many bones, I explained. Like a little pincushion. One stabbed the inside of my cheek, I said, scraping my chair back from the old drafting board we used as a table.

      Bones? he asked, prying apart the flakes of his own fish with a knife and fork. Sorry, I thought I got them all. His voice trailed me down the hallway.

      In the bathroom I ran water and threw up properly. I rummaged through a drawer, hunting out a mini hotel sewing kit. The jab to the inside of my cheek felt like the first prick of a dental injection. Crazy. Did I think he’d ask to see evidence?

      Fucking or Fighting? he asked when I came back to the kitchen.

      What? I tongued the tender inside of my cheek.

      He pointed his fork at the floorboards, cocked his head. His hair hung with the sad luster of velour. The yelps of the girls downstairs floated up.

      Fucking, I answered, but didn’t bother translating the specifics.

      What was real life, then? It was out there, Jody’s version of it. Baling wire and a worthy ache in the arms. Kicking animal feed off the bed of a Hilux, or the swamp seeping into your socks, if you were stupid enough to wear socks. His soles like burred wood, sassafras bark.

      Why couldn’t I tell him? Because I was a coward; if I told him, he’d decide on something. A direction, he’d pick a direction. But I didn’t know which direction that would be, and I didn’t trust myself not to follow it.

      I slept late, woke to strong light, felt stronger myself. I filled the Ayliffe thermos with tea and took it on a walk up Mont Royal. Cross-country skiers slid past, as if on greased rails. When I reached the cross I sat for a while, looking back towards the Plateau for our apartment, but the view didn’t work that way. I took a few mouthfuls of the tea, still hot and oversweet. I had come here to think, but fell into a false, wordless calm, opening the thermos now and then to let the steam breathe up into my face. But I forgot it on the bus coming home. My general carelessness, my carelessness in general. Pas bien fait, pas bien fait. The swan, the thermos, this other thing.

      Winter lingered impossibly, and still we managed to squander it. I had thick Russian classics and some design software to master. I thought if I could just get into the kind of work that let me live out of a laptop … I got twenty-eight pages into War and Peace, and the software never made it as far as an upload. Jody’s skis stayed vertical. There was talk of what to do once the roads thawed, working holidays we could take. In whose car? A bus, then, a train. Apples in the Okanagan? Apples was fall. Oranges, then. Or what comes first—asparagus? Jody looked disgusted. Down south it was strawberries.

      Anyway, we never got away, winter held us close. We drank. We fucked. We downloaded old disaster movies from our childhoods and skipped straight to the quake, the volcano, the aftermath.

      Coming back from the SAQ one Sunday we met Madame Ayliffe taking on the outside world. Reaching her little lavender-gloved paw out to be guided down the last few ice-glazed steps at the front of our building, where snow had obliterated the hessian grip our landlord cheapskated in place of rubber. Jody passed me the rye and ran up ahead, crooked his arm into a wing for Madame to hold on to. He led her down step for step, all southern charm, delivering her to where the sidewalk was freshly gritty with rat-bait-green salt. She grazed me with eyes blank as coat buttons, in that moment possessing no special knowledge about me, perhaps not knowing me at all. Unconcerned by thermoses, missing or otherwise. To Jody she gave no thanks in any language, just nodded her tiny marzipan head and tottered down towards the avenue. We watched after her a while, to make sure she remained upright. Her solid black shoes planted definite as small hooves.

      By then I’d taken up Jody’s schedule, waking at ten or later, the sun already sliding through that colored glass. Hours too late for Kitchen Sink radio, though there would be other noises from Madame Ayliffe’s side of our shared wall, dish clatter or running water, sometimes wailing. I was alarmed at first, until I placed it: Cats. Cats in heat, whose yowlings always sound like maniacs doing bad impersonations of cats. Now and then a scrawny tabby appeared on Ayliffe’s windowsill, twitching its tail, ears flattened. I imagined the other cats huddled in a coven, at the apartment’s heart, gently rising and falling as one heap of multicolored fur.

      Spring crept up on us. Bird noise then insect noise then cheers from the bars on Mont Royal as the Habs beat the Bruins in the second overtime. Stray cats lounging on stoops like sleazy little drunks. Sticky fiddleheads nudging up through the earth, unfurling to bright fronds within seconds.

      Now: everything’s moving, everywhere you look. Squirrels rippling up telephone poles, laundry being cranked along antiquated pulley systems, someone flapping out a bright string hammock and anchoring it between railings. Down in the alleyway, winter’s hockey nets have been repurposed as soccer nets, and kids run back and forth between them, screaming a sweet patois. A woman in the building across from us is drying a load of dishes, bringing each cup, plate, bowl, fork to her back door and standing there half drunk with photosynthesis, rubbing СКАЧАТЬ